We agree with Dr Meldrum about the critical role of health visitors and his helpful suggestion of using the phrase ‘best practice models of primary care safeguarding’ to move forward in this area.
Qualitative research with professionals consistently highlights that health visitors are necessary for bringing wider information to GPs, for following-up GP concerns with a home visit and for acting as a conduit of information between children’s social care and GPs; see for example our study of GPs, health visitors, and practice nurses in England.1
With reduced co-location, one way of bringing together GPs and health visitors for child safeguarding is to have regular meetings to discuss families who have been identified as vulnerable or who raise child protection concerns. These meetings are recommended by the RCGP in their Child Safeguarding Toolkit.2 However, there is little guidance about how they should best be implemented and there remain many unanswered questions, such as: who should attend? Should social care or education colleagues be invited? How often should meetings take place? Who should be discussed and for what purpose? Who should follow up on the meetings and how? How can the meetings be funded and/or attendance incentivised? Do these meetings help support better child safeguarding practice in primary care, and, crucially, make things better for children and families?
These meetings are of great interest to us and our preliminary research suggests that the potential of the meetings is not yet being realised even when they take place.3 This is an area of practice that we wish to develop through good-quality evaluative research and in conjunction with primary care teams.
- © British Journal of General Practice 2014
REFERENCES
- 1.↵
- 2.↵
Safeguarding children, Royal College of General Practitioners. .
- 3.↵
