How do children and parents shape clinical practice? How can clinicians learn from the impact of their patients upon them? How do we recognise if health care practices are adversely affecting health care?

Children's health problems can place enormous strain on both children and their families. Whether symptoms are acute or chronic, assessment and treatment can be confusing and frightening even when the illness itself is not dangerous. Understanding the impact of illness on emotions, relationships and development is an essential part of providing good health care services. For health care professionals it is necessary to understand how their clinical practice affects their patients and how this reciprocal relationship shapes good or bad practice.

Introducing key psychoanalytic concepts Adrian Sutton illustrates through detailed clinical studies how psychoanalytic theory can be applied in a health care setting involving children and their families. Paediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis specifically describes the impact of the patient on the professional, how conscious and unconscious elements need to be taken into account, and to what extent these can influence practice enhancing diagnostic and therapeutic treatment.

Paediatrics, Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis is an exploration of the central importance of the patient-doctor relationship and how the psychodynamics of this relationship are crucial in providing information that can aid treatment. It will be of interest to child mental health professionals – psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, psychologists, nurses, paediatric practitioners and those working in social welfare and educational settings.