Tuesday 1 October 2013

Automatic Child Protection Co-ordination

Automatic Child Protection Co-ordination

In 1971/2 I worked in-house as a computer programmer for the Royal London Hospital and one of the programmes I wrote sorted clinical lab tests overnight. These results were then made easily available to the medics the following day. It was cutting edge stuff back then and the programmes were used elsewhere including in Yorkshire.

There has been two more high profile child abuse deaths in the news in Britain in the last month and in both cases the lack of contact between the various agencies involved has been highlighted as one of the reason why effective action was never taken along with the ussual ‘over worked over stretched professionals’.

Now we could spend more money and employ more professionals though I suspect that would not necessarily totally deal with the problem. Although it would help and our children are worth it surely.

I have another thought. It goes like this. Write some software that searches the electronic records of the various services involved. Think how quick and far reaching software engines now are. So any police, teaching, social work, CAMHS, GP and A & E etc records relating to all our children are regular scanned looking for flagged evidence of concerns expressed. Each local authority would a have a designated child protection officer whose job would be to receive and act on emails alerts electronically generated by this software. The most urgent ones would be flashed up on their computer screen when they switched it on and they would be expected to act immediately. The slightly less urgent ones would be monitored more closely and more actively visited than they are currently getting.

There are some problems with this idea. Confidentiality issues - but we are talking child protection here and presumably some of this is already happening?. Also there may be differing forms of records/procedures for recording the information in the differing agencies. So we might need some form of record standardisation. But think about it - once in place it does not rely on busy people having to contact each other, the software does it.

It needs a working group representing the agencies with an experienced team of software designers to do the work. This work would not put out to tender but hand picked people would be appointed.

The Guardian newspaper did not choose to print a brief letter based on this idea last week. I emailed the NSPCC last week but no reply as yet. Friends and colleagues I have spoken to about this idea like it. My problem is that I am no longer a software expert and I am not a child protection expert. Just a parent and grand parent who wakes up in the middle of the night worrying about these things.

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