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Abstract
In 2018, Her Majesty's Government published statutory and operational guidance setting out how children’s deaths are reviewed in England, aiming to ensure practice is standardised and review of each child’s death is of uniform quality.
Objective A national survey of paediatric intensive care units (PICUs) to review the implementation of the statutory guidance.
Design Online survey exploring child death review (CDR) practices against expected operational standards across three domains: (1) Logistics and administration of the CDR process, (2) the CDR meeting and (3) communication with bereaved families.
Results 19/21 (91%) English PICUs, 1/1 Welsh and 1/1 Northern Irish PICUs responded to the survey request. 6/21 PICUs reported no remuneration for their CDR work. 18/21 reported routinely notifying the local child death overview panel of a child death within 48 hours as per statutory guidance. 8/21 (38%) achieved the current National Health Service England quality outcome target of holding the CDR meeting within 3 months of a child’s death. 17/21 (81%) PICUs appointed a ‘key worker’ as a single point of access to bereaved families. 12/21 (52%) PICUs routinely offered families the option to be informed of the outcome of the CDR meeting at bereavement follow-up.
Conclusions This survey is the first to report on CDR practices in PICUs. It highlights significant variation between units in the application of national guidance. It suggests that further recommendations are required in the application of the statutory guidance to ensure greater parity between units, that learning is shared effectively between agencies and that all bereaved families receive the appropriate information and support.
- Intensive Care Units, Paediatric
- Paediatrics
- Mortality
Data availability statement
All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
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Data availability statement
All data relevant to the study are included in the article or uploaded as supplementary information.
Footnotes
X @finegoulden
Contributors OA, JF and AS equally contributed to the design and conduct of the survey. JF, MFG, AN, TM, PdP, SB, AS, AM and OA contributed to writing of the manuscript. OA is the guarantor for this manuscript and accepts full responsibility for the finished work and the conduct of the study and had access to the data and controlled the decision to publish.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
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