London's children: more than mini adults.

Abstract

Welcome to this issue of the London Journal of Primary Care, with its focus on children. Children account for nearly 1 in 4 of London's population and despite the city's wealth (ranked as 6th worldwide), Rhys Farthing reminds us that over 40% of London's children live in poverty. The repercussions of this fact on health are part of our professional experience and played out in our day to day contact with children and their families. If the NHS is more than a service to deal with sickness but to promote health and improve health inequalities, what does this mean for us? Although recent government announcements look to press pause on developments such as polyclinics and polysystems, there will be many GPs and other primary care staff, who will continue to see more urgently unwell children than before. Nicky Cootes offers advice and guidance including links to further educational resources on how to prepare for this, and to feel confident in dealing with unwell children. In Claire Gerada's editorial she questions the need for specialist paediatric primary care doctors and the potential harms if we lose the generalist GP role. Meanwhile, Terry Bamford in his editorial argues the case for greater involvement of family doctors in safeguarding in light of the Baby P case here in London. As does Sonia Saxena, who proposes that the absence of GP involvement in caring for urgently unwell children, and changes to the delivery of out of hours care may be explanatory factors in the rising trend in hospital admissions observed among children. In this issue, we have a range of articles that review the management of children across a range of conditions from vitamin D deficiency, common eye problems, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to the ethical maze of consent among children and young people.