Children are still transferred by non-specialist teams

EDITOR,—Joseph Britto and colleagues suggest that specialist teams reduce the risks of secondary insults during the transfer of critically ill children from the referring hospital to a tertiary paediatric intensive care unit.1 As Stuart Logan points out in his commentary on the paper, however, debate remains about the effectiveness of specialist transfer services. We prospectively audited external admissions to a tertiary paediatric intensive care unit without its own transfer team. The dataset will permit the introduction of a dedicated, specialist transfer service to be evaluated.

On the child's …