GP Continuity of Care Breakdown

No child about whom there are concerns about deliberate harm should be discharged from hospital back into the community without an identified GP. Responsibility for ensuring this happens rests with the hospital consultant under whose care the child has been admitted.

We recommend that it should be standard practice that consultants in both the NHS and the independent sector should write to patients, outlining their condition and treatment, in simple language, and copy this letter to the patient's GP, rather than writing to the GP and sending a copy to the patient.

The employment of general practitioners should be rationalised to cover the day-to-day needs of long-stay patients: but their valuable contribution should not be regarded as a substitute for specialist services.

Where a child is placed outside the area of its own home authority a social worker preferably of the home authority should be identified and allocated to that child (17.9).

Personal officers should be assigned to individual prisoners, not to a group of cells. They should be members of a small team, so that when a prisoner’s personal officer is not on duty, the prisoner can approach another member of the team.