Jayne Harris and colleagues discuss how healthcare staff can meet the needs of children and their families in acute care settings

This article refers to a personal narrative in which the parents of a child born with Down’s syndrome, who subsequently required surgical intervention for a duodenal atresia, experienced a poor standard of care. It discusses how healthcare organisations can improve the service provided for such patients by making reasonable adjustments, setting up pre-admission services, introducing hospital passports and allocating acute liaison nurses to the parents, and urges all healthcare staff to sign up to Mencap’s (2010) Getting it Right charter.