To the point...

Doctors sometimes drive childcare professionals crazy. They've got such power, and sometimes seem so reluctant to use it. In the olden days that might have been because while everyone else was going on child protection courses, they didn't.

In the last decade or so, however, doctors' reluctance has been driven less by ignorance than fear. We know this because the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health has told us so. This month a former president, Professor Sir David Hall, has rather bravely argued that it is a 'bitter irony' that among the doctors hauled before the General Medical Council (GMC) are some who have contributed 'so much to our knowledge about child abuse'. Furthermore, he adds, their discoveries about how parents sometimes harm their children, and their diagnosis of Fabricated or Induced Illness - the most contested in recent years - are 'often more robust than in many other aspects of child abuse'.

But this has been the object of 'aggressive public campaigning by parents'

groups and the media', which has had a 'devastating effect on clinical practice', Professor Hall warns, in the 5 January issue of the Royal Society of Medicine's journal.

The GMC has been so complicit that the journal's editorial wonders who will protect doctors if they try to protect children at risk.

The situation is so grave that children are being harmed, and even killed, because the profession has been assailed by accused adults. This ought to be a national scandal. But it isn't. The doctors' professional bodies have been, like doctors themselves, intimidated.

But there are signs of a fightback. Professor Hall is eminent, cautious and respectable. His intervention is, therefore, significant. It coincides with a jointly-published training pack by the Royal College and the NSPCC.

This alliance is a creative use of their different histories and skills.

The training pack deserves to be disseminated throughout the childcare world. Its specific purpose is both to educate doctors, and to empower them.

Doctors must be confident to express their concerns appropriately about children's safety. That duty has been contested by the accused and their advocates, but it has been confirmed by the courts, and it is unequivocal in the Children Act.

Their colleagues in other childcare professions would do well to get this pack, learn from it, and raise their expectations of doctors bullied into submission.