Meeting of the Parliament 08 June 2016
Let me make a little progress.
Jenny Laing, of Aberdeen City Council, made a similar comment, and today, Dr Simon Knight, who is a senior youth practitioner in Glasgow, said that his colleagues are increasingly concerned that decisions about children are not going to be left up to professional training and judgment but will be determined by an “endless list of protocols”. The key point is that those professionals fear that the additional burden of paperwork inevitably means that the most vulnerable children will receive less attention than they should receive, which is not a situation that professionals want.
A second area of disquiet among professionals is around where responsibilities lie when it comes to data sharing, especially the transfer of confidential information about doctors’ and dentists’ patients. As we know, medical ethics are strong and precise on that point. Experienced paediatrician Jenny Cunningham said that although medics fully recognise that on occasion they must share with social workers and police matters to do with child protection, the extension of the duty to include the sharing of information between agencies where it is felt that a child’s wellbeing is at risk, which she says is an ineluctably subjective judgment, will inevitably undermine the trust between doctors and families.