Professor Sir Alan Craft, president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said more children were appearing in emergency care departments because GPs were opting out of doing out-of-hours work.
He called for primary care trusts to recognise this in the allocation of funding, and said it was becoming a "huge problem for hospitals".
His call follows a study that found many accident and emergency departments fall short of minimum standards set by the Accident and Emergency Services for Children review in 1999.
The study, published in the British Medical Journal, looked at 139 emergency departments that see more than 18,000 children a year, and found almost one in three consultants had not had specialist training in paediatric emergency care.
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