Gillick competency and Fraser guidelines

Gillick competence is the principle we use to judge capacity in children to consent to medical treatment. Fraser guidelines are used specifically for children requesting contraceptive or sexual health advice and treatment.

Following a recent request for information I set out to research a guide on the issue of access to medical records for young persons which would need to look at the concepts around Gillick Competency and Fraser guidelines. What I actually found were that a number of excellent web resources already exist and so rather than reproduce them I thought I’d simply highlight the links to them here so you can easily access they if you need to.

The first is this web page from the NSPCC which covers the whole issue very well with a set of questions to help you establish the Gillick competence as well as clear definition of the Fraser guidelines and finally a link to some further reference sources.

This page here is from the CQC excellent resource called Nigel’s Surgery.

This document here, published on the rather obscure National Centre for Biotechnology Information web site goes into some details around the differences between Gillick and Fraser and dispels the widespread myth that Mrs Gillick does not want her name associated with this issue.