E05: Paediatric Challenges with Dr Anna Manolopoulos

Most paediatric IME assessments don't arrive straightforward. They arrive with a child who can't fully articulate what happened, a parent filling in the gaps, records that don't always align, and a developmental picture that changes everything about how you read the presentation. The job isn't just assessing the injury. It's working out what the child can actually tell you, what the adults around them are projecting, and what the evidence can genuinely support.Dr Anna Manolopoulos is a Melbourne-based orthopaedic surgeon with a subspecialty interest in paediatric orthopaedic surgery, operating across several of Melbourne's major public and private hospitals. She conducts IME assessments alongside a busy clinical practice spanning both adult and paediatric patients.Host Jess Marshall asks the questions every IME practitioner faces when the claimant is a child:How do you take a reliable history when the person at the centre of the claim is too young, too anxious, or too developmentally limited to give one?When a child's language sounds more like a 40-year-old's than their own, how do you document that without overstepping what you can actually prove?At what point does parental involvement shift from helpful context to a variable that compromises your assessment?How do you interpret pain complaints and functional limitations in a population that has no tolerances framework and nothing to compare their experience to?What are the ethical obligations specific to paediatric IME work - chaperoning, consent, and the grey zone around adolescent autonomy - that simply don't apply in the same way to adults?Dr Manolopoulos's approach starts with the child, not the guardian. She establishes engagement before she establishes history, and she applies clinical judgment with precision when the documentation supports it and honesty when it doesn't. On the challenge of separating what a child genuinely experiences from what they've absorbed from the adults around them:"Parents don't often coach their children. They really don't. But they often talk in front of their children about their own anxieties, and kids will absorb that. They might be repeating what they've been hearing."Dr Manolopoulos covers paediatric history-taking frameworks, functional assessment across developmental stages, managing parental presence without compromising independence, pain interpretation in young claimants, non-accidental injury screening, and how to handle a frustrated WorkCover claimant honestly without overstepping your role as assessor.Medico-Legal Mastery is proudly supported by Melbourne Medicolegal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.