NHS reforms will put children's lives at risk: NHS managers The Government is still to clarify where responsibilities will lie, including which organisation locally will have the overall responsibility for providing specialist safeguarding services. It is also unclear how it will encourage organisations across the public services to work together. The Confederation warned: "Without overarching policy to make organisations across public services work together, clarity over who does what and how the system will work from the national to the local level, children face a fragmented and confusing system to ensure their health needs are met and they are protected properly. Confused and fragmented commissioning and provision of services and a failure of organisations to work together have repeatedly been identified as root causes of major failures of child protection in the past. The Baby P case highlighted major failings in the child protection system when Peter Connelly died aged 17 months having suffered 50 separate injuries over eight months despite having been seen by successive doctors, being known to social services and police. Jo Webber, deputy policy director, of the NHS Confederation, said: "We have ample evidence from the past of what goes wrong when organisations are not coordinated to work together properly. Through joint work between councils and the NHS, we have made great strides since then. There is deep unease in the NHS that, in reorganising the system, we are resetting to a model that is potentially riskier and certainly more fragmented. The Government is right to try and devolve power to the lowest level possible. But outcomes for protecting children should not vary. The safety and health of some of the most vulnerable people in our society cannot be subject to local discretion. Vulnerable children with complex needs will now find the responsibility for their care and their safety spread out between a range of organisations - and on the NHS side, all of them will be completely new. We know through painful experience that it is between the gaps in responsibilities that the most tragic and difficult cases fall. With nothing making these organisations work together in the way they should, we have to be honest that the risk of us failing is more likely. Nobody here today wants that to happen. The time has come to be honest with Government and together now resolve these issues before a policy problem becomes a tragic failure.