Child death overview panels

The death of any child is a tragedy. It is vital that all child deaths are carefully reviewed.

All Local Safeguarding Children Partnerships are required to have a Child Death Overview Panel (CDOP) to see whether we can learn lessons from child deaths, in order to improve the health, safety and wellbeing of other children. Through this, we hope to prevent further child deaths.

The death of all children under the age of 18 must be reviewed by Pan Cheshire or the Pan Merseyside Child Death Overview Panels, where multi agency professionals meet to review all the child deaths in the area. The Panel is not given the names of any children who died - all the details are dealt with anonymously. The main purpose is to learn how to prevent future deaths.

The key functions of a CDOP are to:

• Review all child deaths, excluding those babies who are stillborn and planned terminations of pregnancy carried out within the law
• Determine whether the death was preventable (if there were modifiable factors which may have contributed to the death)
• Decide what, if any, actions could be taken to prevent such deaths happening in the future
• Identify patterns or trends in local data and reporting these to the Safeguarding children partnership
• Refer cases to the Safeguarding Children Partnership Chairs where there is suspicion that neglect, or abuse may have been a factor in the child’s death. In such cases, a Child Safeguarding Practice Review may be required.
• Agree local procedures for responding to unexpected child deaths

More information can be found below.