In the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I was a very young mum, we had several experiences in A and E where DD would go in with some sort of minor injury or illness that needed attention - stubborn croup in one case (referred by GP), a couple of stitches needed in another, one time she pulled a tea cup over herself and the burn needed dressing properly to make sure it didn't scar. These are routine incidents that often happen to kids as they grow up. Every single time I was hounded by some over zealous twit, usually a fairly junior doctor, guilty of child abuse until proven innocent.
Eventually I took advice from my mum, who is very wise about such things, and she suggested that it might be worth getting DP to phone up the lead consultant in his authoritative male voice. DP did this and said how disturbed we were that there might be some deep meaningful underlying problem, and we had decided that only the best was good enough for our DD, so we were wanting his suggestion for a referral to the top consultant psychiatrist for such things, in his opinion.
Of course the lead consultant did not want to refer, as it was clear that he would look a right plonker if he sent us to someone like this, given that DD had suffered from a small number of minor childhood things and had perfectly normal, supportive parents. He told us not to worry and he would 'deal with it' for us. I presume this meant speaking to the most recent culprit and asking him what the hell he was doing. Anyway, the problem went away, and when she had a headache, high temperature and stiff neck a year later, and I took her in to rule out meningitis, we were treated normally (it transpired it was flu plus a neck injury sustained in a school PE lesson, but all of those together was pretty scary. Anyway, I trangress).
In the light of my own experience, what I worry about is that inexperienced doctors and nurses sometimes have a messianic zeal for safeguarding. They carry out ill informed and fairly amateurish profiling, picking on certain groups of parents and subjecting them to all sorts of unwarranted attention. If this is unproven and put on a database, it is very easy to start building up a picture of abuse where none exists. It will deter people from taking kids to A and E for minor things (it would certainly have deterred me if the lead consultant hadn't taken it upon himself to set his department in order) and lead to a breakdown of trust between professional and parents/child.
When I wrote our departmental child safeguarding policy for students on placements, one of the things I made sure was emphasised was the need to refer upwards and not approach safeguarding with a missionary zeal in order to 'feel good' or 'feel professional'. It's all about the children, at the end of the day, and where real abuse exists (which is rarer than you would think), there needs to be a careful approach involving people who have direct experience of dealing with such things over a long period of time, not people who have read about it in a text book or seen a couple of documentaries on the telly. Blundering about interrogating parents every five minutes or filling databases with unsubstantiated allegations is not going to help. It needs expertise, proper training, and nuanced professionalism. Better to have a policy where all children attending A and E have a full health check each time, for example, or increase the number of school nurses, or invest in Sure Start, or offer annual child health checks via the GP. Databases are a poorly conceived, commercially driven alternative, and will be a complete waste of taxpayers' money (as ContactPoint was).