Recent high-profile child-protection failings in Haringey, Birmingham and Doncaster, and the subsequent investigation from Lord Laming, have highlighted the need for close interagency collaboration in safeguarding of children.1–2 This is amply evident from the original article from Kirk et al.3 The authors showed that 67% of the medical assessments of children with alleged physical abuse revealed findings diagnostic or supportive of the allegations. Notably, however, all child-protection referrals were screened through the process of an interagency referral discussion. This resulted in only 19% of all referrals to proceed to a medical assessment.

We conducted a similar service evaluation …