Safety recommendation
It is recommended that the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) develop a key practice point within a decision support tool for suspected or known ingestion of button/coin cell batteries, and to be supported in this development by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.
Response:
The RCPCH’s Paediatric Care Online (PCO UK) team are happy to accept safety recommendation 2019/35, made in the report. In July 2019 the team liaised with the Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) to recruit a content editor, to lead development of this workstream, and expert external peer reviewers from a paediatric emergency medicine background. A content editor was successfully appointed along with five expert external peer reviewers. The team met with the content editor on Friday 16 August to kick-start the work and prepare a first draft of the Key Practice Point (KPP) on button battery ingestion in children.
Going forward further expert external peer reviewers will be recruited from the Association of Paediatric Emergency Medicine (APEM) and British Association of General Paediatrics (BAGP), and consideration made on recruiting a paramedic reviewer.
The estimated timeframe for the first draft of the Key Practice Point is the end of September 2019, whereupon the draft will undergo a series of reviews and a consultation. Publication is planned for early 2020, in conjunction with appropriate communication and dissemination from both RCPCH and RCEM.
Response received on 5 September 2019.