This document is based on Working Together to Safeguard Children: A guide to inter-agency working to safeguard and promote the welfare of children (Department of Health et al, 1999). Working Together sets out how all agencies and professionals should work together to safeguard and promote children’s welfare. This supplementary guidance is intended to provide a national framework within which agencies and professionals at local level – individually and jointly – draw up and agree upon their own more detailed ways of working together where illness may be being fabricated or induced in a child by a carer who has parenting responsibilities for him or her.
This condition is also commonly known as Munchausen syndrome by proxy, Factitious illness by proxy or Illness Induction syndrome. This document is aimed at those who work in the health and education services, the police, social services departments, the probation service, and others whose work brings them into contact with children and families. It is relevant to those working in the statutory, voluntary and independent sectors.