MEDICAL DIAGNOSIS GUIDELINES

That this House recognises the tragic nature of the deaths of children through clinical misdiagnosis or malpractice; notes the study by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine published in the British Medical Journal, Improving child health services in the UK: insights from Europe and their implications for the NHS reforms, reporting an inquiry in which `identifiable failure in the child's direct care' was found in 26 per cent of child deaths, and potentially avoidable factors in 43 per cent of deaths; further recognisesthat this is particularly regrettable in cases where the child's parent or carer was aware of the child's sickness but felt as though their concerns were not heeded by medical practitioners; appreciates the difficulty facing diagnosticians in distinguishing between common, minor complaints and rarer, life-threatening illnesses; believes that in the case of child diagnosis the instinct and observation of the child's main carer is frequently highly valuable in identifying symptoms; further notes the e-petition campaign for Bethany's Law to raise the profile of child misdiagnosis through insufficient consideration of the observations of a child's carer; and calls on the Government to ensure that medical diagnosis guidelines include particular emphasis on taking the observations of the child's main carer into account.