Child death review procedures are ready to be standardised

The forms will help establish the full circumstances behind a child's death and have been developed by the University of Warwick, which has also been working on a training programme for professionals involved with the child death review processes.

Local safeguarding children boards will be able to use the information collected on the forms to inform policies on safeguarding children in their area.

Peter Sidebotham, the research team's principal investigator, said a group has been working on creating national data collection forms for the child death process.

"We will have a standardised form for the notification of a child death, a form for collecting data about each child death and an analysis tool for child death overview panels to use when reviewing data," he said. "These standardised forms will collect all the information needed by a child death overview panel."