Agenda item

The Board received the South Yorkshire Child Death Overview Panel Annual Report for 2020-21.  In outlining the background to the Annual Report, Dr Rupert Suckling explained that under the Children’s Act 2004, certain partners including Health, the Police and the Council were required to have arrangements in place for reviewing child deaths.  He explained that following a review of these requirements, it had been recognised that very few child deaths were due to safeguarding issues and were mostly related to medical conditions.  This being the case, the national leadership for the Child Death Overview Panels had been moved from the Department of Education to the Department of Health.  This had led to local arrangements being reviewed and as a result, it had been decided to switch responsibility for this function from the Safeguarding Board to the Health and Wellbeing Board, with this Board’s Terms of Reference being amended accordingly.

Dr Suckling explained that it had been agreed across South Yorkshire to combine resources and to pool the information gathered into one South Yorkshire Report.  This regional approach enabled partners to gain a greater understanding of what was happening across areas and provided more opportunities to intervene, where required.  It also mirrored the current arrangements with health partners operating on a South Yorkshire basis, especially around maternity services.

Dr Suckling then summarised the salient points in the Annual Report in relation to the Doncaster cases and how these broke down according to the different age groups and primary category of death.  He concluded by stating that there would be more in-depth reports in the future and that the intention was to align this Report with the Adults and Children’s Safeguarding Boards’ Annual Reports so that this Board received all 3 reports at the same time going forward.

During subsequent discussion, Dr Suckling answered questions and Board members made a number of observations on the following issues:-

• Dr Suckling confirmed that he Chaired the Child Death Overview Panel in Doncaster and that the Panel comprised representatives from Children’s Services, the Police and from Doncaster and Bassetlaw Hospitals;
• With regard to any urgent priorities currently needing attention, Dr Suckling explained that 2 issues frequently came up in case reviews.  The first related to support to families after a child’s death, such as access to bereavement services.  While there had been improvements in this area, the effectiveness of these measures had not been fully assessed yet.  The second issue concerned the physical estates in acute hospitals and A&E departments, as there were issues around the availability of suitable facilities and rooms to talk to parents in A&E departments on occasions when a child had died.
• Lee Golze highlighted that there had been challenges in Doncaster around the provision of bereavement and counselling support for peers and school staff.  He explained that while extra resources had been commissioned in this area in the past year, he stressed that this was only on the basis of short term funding.
• Cath Witherington informed the Board that Voluntary Action Doncaster had just started facilitating a network of counselling therapists in Doncaster and that she would feed back the points raised at this meeting to that Group.
• The Chair confirmed that lessons learned from individual child death cases were always picked up and embedded in the commissioning cycle and health services to ensure that improvements were made where these were identified.
• Councillor Andrea Robinson noted that the Doncaster report made reference to the operational demands of Covid having significantly reduced the frequency of CDOP meetings and she commented on the lack of detail compared to the reports from the neighbouring South Yorkshire areas and hoped that the next report for Doncaster would match the others in terms of detail.

It was then

RESOLVED to note the Annual Report.