Child Death Review is a process required by the Health and Social Care Act 2017 and is governed by the statutory guidance Working Together (2018). It covers all child deaths (0–18 years), and is led by CDR partners, mainly Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) and Local Authorities (LAs).

Broadly, CDR  involves the notification of death when a child dies, initial information gathering, a Child Death Review Meeting (CDRM); a multi-agency meeting to discuss the clinical and other factors associated with the death, identifying areas of learning and improvement, and a final Child Death Overview Panel (CDOP): a multi-agency panel that analyses trends and identifies modifiable factors. The CDOP then assigns system-level actions to help prevent deaths where possible, aiming to improve the experiences of the bereaved and drive forward the CDR agenda with local multi-agency partners.

Death cases are anonymised and submitted to the National Child Mortality Database (NCMD), with analysed data and modifiable factors producing national learning reports to inform policy and service design.

CDR also coordinates with specialised death review processes like the LeDeR Programme (Learning from Lives and Deaths - People with a Learning Disability and Autistic People). LeDeR focuses on the deaths of people and children with learning disabilities and autistic people, aiming to identify health inequalities and improve care.

The CDR process has two main goals:

■ The gathering and use of learning to drive prevention of future child deaths, where possible.

■ The delivery and improvement of compassionate, culturally competent bereavement support.

DDCS is an independent healthcare consultancy company, providing a range of supportive, analytical and educational services to CDR organisations and professionals. Through our work, we aim to:

■ Spread awareness of CDR and reduce systemic health inequalities in our local communities.

■ Offer support and expertise to ensure that local health, social care, and education partnerships understand how they can better meet the needs of babies, children, young people, and their parents, carers and families.

■ Improve data-sharing between CDR partners, services and organisations.

■ Listen to healthcare professionals’, parents, carers, and families’ concerns, working towards a constructive and co-creative CDR workplace.

■ Help healthcare professionals and systems adapt for CDR compliance and innovation.

We specialise in delivering tasks and finished senior strategic support. Available expertise includes Subject Matter Expertise across a number of Public Health priority programmes.

To find out more, check the Our Work, Working Ethos and Our Values sections.

Our team is London-based, with outreach capacity across England and Wales.

To learn more about our team members, click here.

We have a track record of working alongside NHS clinical services, social carers, police, and Coronial professionals in improving and supporting local CDR systems, Child Death Overview Panels (CDOPs) and local Safeguarding Boards.

Given our established and frequent presence at local CDR operational meetings, CDOPs and CDRMs, we have also worked with keyworkers, bereavement support workers, CDR coordinators, nurses, and clinicians.

Our work in the past has also included collaboration with local authority organisations, NHS Trust leads, local public health directors, medical examiners and public healthcare consultants.

Given our goals in building a more compassionate, insightful and culturally competent CDR process, we would welcome collaboration with parent and carer advocacy groups.

To know more about our work and past experience, click here.

We offer the following services:

■ Training for CDR workers (including health and social care professionals, educators, etc.)

■ Educational resources (including but not limited to: webinars, videos, policy summaries and briefings, toolkits/frameworks, resource banks)

■ Commissioned, bespoke investigative work (including but not limited to: data collection through surveys and interviews, data analysis, Rapid Reviews, Deep Dive Reviews)

Our services are flexible in their scalability and affordability.

Our Deep Dive Reviews, like all our investigative work, is comprehensive, personalised, and grounded in local context with an outlook on the larger CDR landscape.

DDCS Deep Dive Reviews typically include:

Executive summaries of the current client’s CDR services, strengths, and constructive feedback to improve service delivery.

Delivery Action Plans: personalised action recommendations to improve specific CDR services, including preventive action guidance.

National, regional and local CDR context and investigation (including current policy, local work culture, related CDR data and statistics).

Data collection and analysis: relevant data may be sourced from NCMD, ONS, MBRACE, Fingertips and our own investigations to paint the most detailed picture possible on our client’s current CDR services and outcomes. Previous CDR data analysis factors have included ethnicity, gender identity, disabilities and autism, geography, temporality, other social determinants of health (SDOH), temporary accommodation, deprivation indexes, and other contributory factors.

Overall, our Deep Dive Reviews are in alignment with CDR government reports and statutory guidance: guiding review themes include the client’s impact, practice sustainability, quality assurance, service accountability and compliance.

Our commitment to driving down inequalities in CDR service access and outcomes is at the heart of our working practices, particularly in the scalability and affordability of our work. This focus is also incredibly present in our data analysis, spotlighting a range of social determinants of health and contributory factors. These factors include; temporary accommodation, poverty/deprivation, disability, gender identity - with the aim of reducing data erasure, improving modifiable factor identification, and improving data quality and completeness by building on data-driven impact.

At DDCS, we work to support CDR professionals to do their best possible work with the resources available to them. We aim to bring out the best in the collaborative practice, evidence-based techniques, and openness, providing high-quality low-cost solutions to the tremendous problems CDR workers face.

We all need to be working earlier, more effectively and more closely with our communities and our teams to drive child death prevention. To support our common goal, we aim to refresh our resources for the communities of professional practice we are proud to be a part of.

Our recent guides on CDR parental involvement practices contribute to the sharing of learning between CDR professionals, aiming to improve accessibility and take-up of bereavement support. Our educational resources and research address current knowledge gaps in the system, looking into critical issues like parental involvement, professional involvement and proportionate challenge in CDR workplaces. We aim to highlight practical resources for day-to-day work, alongside more comprehensive guides to help implement change in professionals’ local CDR contexts.

Our work is guided by the need to centre bereaved parents, carers and siblings in CDR, protecting and fully considering their voices in our practice.

We work to bring CDR professionals a deep reading of the current landscape across several key agendas. DDCS brings simplicity, clarity, and synthesis while maintaining the appropriate nuance to navigate CDR. Our resources and services help clients understand what they really need to know in a way they can understand, assimilate, and share with the local system and partners.

By offering affordable and scalable public health support solutions to NHS and Local Authority organisations requiring additional expertise across high priority areas, we improve service accessibility, contributing to reducing health inequalities and improving health outcomes in CDR.

As part of our work to drive down inequalities and work towards a more compassionate CDR, we always work with our clients to provide flexible and affordable pricing, tailored to your budgets. We work to meet you wherever your financial situation is.

We recognise that CDR services and professionals are undervalued and underfunded, contributing to service delivery and health disparities across the system. Our communities cannot afford prevention efforts to be left behind.

With this in mind, we are practical and scale our services and commissioned projects to your budgets.

You can access several of our educational resources for free on our website, and request further information at info@ddconsultancyservices.com.

Please reach out to us by email through info@ddconsultancyservices.com or drop us a message on our Contact Us section. To stay up to date on our work, events and conference coverage, you can sign up to our updates here.

Unfortunately, we currently do not offer volunteering roles. However, we are working to set up volunteering opportunities at DDCS in outreach and programme support soon. To register your interest, use our messaging form on our Contact Us section.