Giving Paediatric Teams the Answers Families Deserve

For the paediatric clinicians working alongside those families, the frustration is just as real. Not because they do not want to help, but because the information they need to reassure families is held in systems they cannot see.  

A referral was made weeks ago. Has it been received? Has it been triaged? Has it been rejected, and if so, why? Without access to that information, clinicians are left telling families they will look into it and call back. That is not the joined-up experience families expect, or that clinical teams want to deliver. 

Paediatric psychology teams often support children who are known to multiple services at once. A child with a physical health condition may also be under the care of a children's mental health service, a neurodevelopmental pathway, and a specialist acute team. Each of those services holds information relevant to the child's care. Almost none of it is routinely shared in real time. 

The result is a familiar kind of friction. A clinician wants to know whether a referral to a children's mental health service has been accepted. They call the main number. They’re passed around. They leave a message. The callback comes when they are with another patient. Days pass, and the family is still waiting for an answer. 

"Sometimes I've just abandoned it," one paediatric clinical psychologist told us. "They say someone will call you back, and they don't, or you miss their call. It could go on over days, and you've lost that time you just wanted that information." 

That time lost is not just an inconvenience. For children already on long waiting lists, delays in sharing information between services mean families spend longer in uncertainty. And for clinicians, the inability to give families clear answers chips away at the trust that makes therapeutic relationships work.

When a family is navigating the children's mental health system, they’re not just waiting for their child to be seen. They’re trying to understand what is happening at every stage. Has the referral gone in? Has it been accepted? Who is going to see their child, and when? 

Clinicians who work closely with those families carry those questions too. They become informal navigators, chasing information on behalf of the families they support, trying to join up a system that was not designed to be joined up. 

The problem is compounded when referrals are rejected. If a referral to a children's mental health service is turned down, the family may not find out. The referring clinician may not find out either, or may only discover it weeks later through an indirect channel. Meanwhile, the child is waiting for support that is never coming, and nobody has said so.

The shift that happens when paediatric teams gain real-time visibility of referral status and care progress across connected services is felt immediately, and not just operationally. 

Through Access Intelligent Care Platform (AICP), a clinician can see whether a referral has been made, when it was submitted, where it currently sits, and who the named clinician is. If a referral has been rejected, the reason is visible. If a triage decision has been made, it shows up. If an appointment has been arranged, the clinician can see where and when. 

"I was able to see the outcome of why the referral had been rejected," one clinician reflected, "which was really helpful for the medical team to say, actually, they're not going to be seen by that team, because the referral was rejected for this reason." 

That kind of clarity should not be the exception. For families with children in complex care pathways, it should be the starting point. 

The practical impact is equally significant. Calls to switchboards are replaced by a direct check, and the rabbit warren of trying to track down the right person in the right team becomes, in most cases, unnecessary. This changes the conversation with the family entirely. 

"I could almost see it live," one clinician described, recalling a crisis referral made on behalf of a young person. "I could see at twelve o'clock that they had logged the referral. Triaged it by two o'clock. I could see that someone had reviewed it. Later in the day an appointment had been arranged. I could see where and when it was." 

That level of visibility doesn’t just save time. It allows clinicians to close the loop with families in a way that was previously impossible. The referral has been accepted. Your child has an appointment. Here’s what happens next.

There is something that gets overlooked in conversations about information sharing in paediatric services. Reassurance is not just a nice thing to offer families. For children with complex physical and mental health needs, whose families are often managing significant anxiety alongside everything else, the ability of a clinician to say with confidence "I can see what is happening and here is where things stand" is clinically meaningful. 

"I always worried how it came across," one clinician reflected, "because it maybe didn't feel joined up. I don't really know what was going on, which I think always has the risk of coming across as not really reassuring to parents." 

That worry disappears when the information is there. Clinicians stop saying they’ll find out and start saying they already know. The family feels less alone in navigating a complex system, and the clinician can focus on the work they trained for rather than the administrative chase that has quietly become part of it. 

With the growing demand for children’s mental health support, paediatric services are under significant and sustained pressure. Teams are being asked to do more with the same resources, to coordinate across more services, and to maintain the quality of their relationships with families throughout the entire process. 

In that context, the hours spent chasing referral information, navigating switchboards, and trying to find out what another service has decided are not a minor friction – they're clinical capacity that could be going somewhere else. Every conversation a clinician doesn’t have to chase is a conversation they can have with a family instead. 

"It just feels a lot nicer," one clinician said, "rather than saying I don't know, you can say I've been able to check. I can see this is happening. I can chase that up for you." 

That’s what giving paediatric teams the answers families deserve truly looks like. Not a system redesign or an additional resource to worry about - just the information that already exists, made visible at the moment it’s needed.