BMJ  2004;328 (7 February), doi:10.1136/bmj.328.7435.0-g

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The sudden death of a child

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

"The sudden unexpected death of an infant or child is one of the worst events to happen to any family." This is the opening line of a review by authors from Bristol of how best to investigate such deaths and care for bereaved families (p 331). Such a death presents great difficulties to doctors, social workers, and the police, and the difficulties have been increased by the publicity surrounding wrongful conviction of parents of murder. Every primary care trust is supposed to have a "designated doctor" to serve on child protection teams, but a third of these posts are unfilled (p 307).

The management of sudden deaths of infants would be extremely testing even if the doctors could be confident that they were all due to natural causes. But they can't be. A study of 456 deaths and 1800 age matched surviving controls showed that 21 . . . [Full text of this article]

(rsmith@bmj.com)

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