She said more services needed to be offered outside of hospitals, with paediatricians working more closely with GPs.
Dr Tounian acknowledged that paediatricians faced great difficulty in getting obese children to lose weight, but said greater success was imperative.
The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges is a "united front" of the medical profession from surgeons to GPs and psychiatrists to paediatricians.
Guidelines state that paediatricians hold meetings with the police, social services and the other agencies involved within 24 hours of the alarm being raised.
University College London academics interviewed paediatricians at 177 hospitals in England and Wales and found a lack of knowledge about the warning signs of children being underweight.
The 13year old from the West Midlands won the right to a judicial review of a decision by community paediatricians to refer his case to social services.
The Welsh government said young patients currently had to travel to seven different locations across Swansea for services including occupational therapy, physiotherapy, speech and language therapy, and community paediatricians.
The report was commissioned as part of a wide ranging review of services in the region by the Royal College of Midwives, Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and the Royal College of Paediatricians.
BBC: NEWS | UK | Wales | South West Wales | Service fear at maternity report
So it is unlikely that the research, published in the journal Neuropsychology, will radically change the way that obstetricians and paediatricians approach delivery of premature babies, and their care in the first hours after birth.
But he stressed that as those surveyed would be the first paediatricians to assess such children, especially out of hours, they needed to know how to spot dangerously underweight children and teenagers and signs of severe complications.
BBC: Doctors 'miss' underweight children, UCL study suggests
There is increasing pressure from the government to reconfigure children's services so that senior paediatricians are located in more specialist inpatient units, with smaller hospital wards closing or being converted to daytime-only units staffed by specialist nurses and visiting consultants.
As changes within the NHS and the financial squeeze start to bite, hospitals are looking again at the affordability of keeping skilled paediatricians available on call 24 hours a day in small hospitals where there are similar services within about 30 minutes drive.
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