Research could aid assessment of young children's injuries

According to a statement, medical professionals currently base decisions on their prior knowledge and experience. This can be subjective — and the ramifications of making the wrong decision can be huge, for both child and parent.

Dr Amaka Offiah, consultant at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and senior lecturer at Sheffield University’s Department of Human Metabolism, along with a team of researchers from the Faculty of Engineering, are working together to create a system aimed at providing robust scientific evidence to support clinicians faced with having to assess how an injury may have been sustained.

Dr Offiah said: ‘Most physically abused children are too young to say how their injuries came about and we, as medics, are reliant on our own experience to make a decision about whether what the parent is saying is realistic or not.’

This research is in its early stages and the multidisciplinary team, including engineers and medics, is currently working on creating computerised models that show how children’s bones react to different forces.