Health services must heed children's views

How well, or ill, are our children? When we have picked our way through some of the wilder commentaries that seek to answer that question, how well are they really and, where they aren’t well, how are we going to work together, and with them, to try to make them better?

We are about to publish examples of children’s experiences of health, especially when they meet GPs as patients in their own right. We have toyed with several titles, all as ever taken from what young people say to us about their experiences and their stories. Many are a tad weary of not being taken seriously. Some, in some places, have found a way into the mystique, the language and the aura of the medical world. Some have been addressed and listened to directly rather than simply talked about in the presence of an adult.

In some places, it is true they are greeted and then treated, especially if they have a long-term condition or disability – they know what they’re talking about because they have expertise in the condition. Too many of them have said their experience had been so bad that health professionals are wearyingly and bluntly dismissive.

How can we all work together to improve this? Since January, I have been part of Health Secretary Andrew Lansley’s first Health Outcome Strategy Forum. To his credit, it’s on the outcomes for children. It mentions the research to overcome cultural barriers in the health service by Sir Ian Kennedy in 2010 and the work on inequalities championed by Sir Michael Marmot. For us wild optimists, it is a cause for encouragement to keep plugging away.

Whatever else we might think of the health reforms, this forum has given us a chance to press home some vital messages and to hope for action. We are a diverse group, taking in medics, parents, charities, children’s services directors, public health specialists, psychiatrists and civil servants.

My key role has been to create some support material on inequalities. We have known since health records began that some people in a developed country like ours live far shorter, less healthy, more complex lives than others. For some children in England in 2012, the following things are nice to have, but simply unattainable: a healthy diet; an adequate winter wardrobe; a dry home where they are not at risk of chest infections; access to a dentist; take-up of immunisation; mental health services available before matters reach crisis point; good advice on drugs or alcohol; and good advice on risky ?or exploitative sexual activity, including avoiding pregnancy and parenthood in adolescence.
 
The inequalities paper I submitted to the forum, to which many others contributed great content and evidence, presents a two-part challenge. If we know what we have known for so very long, why is it apparently still such a struggle to do what is necessary to change it for the better? How is every part of the new NHS to be held firmly and irrevocably to tackling it? 

And, yes, doctor, nurse, health support worker, chair of the clinical commissioning group, members of the health and wellbeing board – I mean you and I mean now. And so do the children saying, through the forum: “Hello? Is anybody listening to me?”  

Maggie Atkinson is the children’s commissioner for England