When the Labour leader, now Prime Minister, Keir Starmer said in June that his government would ‘create the healthiest generation of children ever’, some wondered whether this was realistic.
Now, the Children and Young People’s Health Policy Influencing Group (HPIG) at the National Children’s Bureau (NCB), which includes Starlight, Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and around 60 other child health organisations, has produced proposals for this more detailed plan.
The Healthiest Generation of Children: a Roadmap for the Health System, launched on 4 November, calls for children to be a central pillar of the forthcoming NHS Ten Year Plan, with equitable funding to match.
One of the group’s recommendations, part of a focus on putting ‘families and the experience of babies, children, young people at the centre of services’ is that ‘play services, including health play specialists for clinical support, should be integral to the commissioning, design, and delivery of all paediatric care’.
This is vitally important. For too long, play services in the NHS have been regarded as a ‘nice-to-have’, which in cash-strapped times translates as an unnecessary extravagance. Until recently (after overtures from Starlight and our allies on the health play taskforce) the NHS careers portal situated play staff in the ‘corporate services’ category, as opposed to part of the clinical support staff within multi-disciplinary teams that is the proper context for their role, and now recognised as such.
There is a growing body of evidence that play – and the support of practitioners who understand play – is the best way for health services to protect children’s mental and emotional wellbeing in acute, emergency and palliative care. It can stop them feeling isolated, relieve their anxiety, prepare them for difficult procedures, and distract them during painful parts of their treatment.
Perhaps most importantly, playing enables children to stay engaged and to have agency in their own healthcare. All of these things mitigate the risks of children suffering traumatic psychological stress and its consequences on top of the condition or illness for which they need care. And at a time when NHS funding pressures are greater than ever, we also know that less-distressed, better-engaged children mean faster, more efficient treatment pathways.
NCB’s Amanda Allard, who co-chairs HPIG said “the Budget was a missed opportunity to set out how major new investment in the NHS will improve struggling child health services...Children will only be a priority in the NHS if we get leadership from the very top…Our Roadmap sets out how they can deliver this”.
Starlight agrees, which is why we have joined RCPCH in calling for a cabinet minister for children (not just education), to drive a long-term plan for children’s health. Our collective aim must now be for the new NHS 10-year plan to fully adopt the recommendations of this Roadmap, including the integral role of play services in making children’s healthcare genuinely child-centred.