Editorial: Child protection inadequacies are still rife

Three years after the publication of the Children's Act, it uncovers a disturbing lack of partnership working between health and social care. Precisely the same mistakes that allowed Victoria Climbie to slip through the net are still being made.

The report finds social work support to be something of a lottery for children admitted to hospitals outside their home authority, as Climbie repeatedly was. Most local authorities are yet to formalise service expectations in such cases. It also finds that access to child protection registers by hospital staff is patchy, particularly for children from authorities outside the hospital's area. And where children are kept in hospital for more than three months, few hospitals or local authorities have developed protocols for assessing their needs, despite a recommendation for hospital trusts to do so in the most recent joint chief inspector's report.