Safeguarding Adults Week 2022
This week is Safeguarding Adults Week (Monday 21st November – Sunday 27th November)! We’re joining with the Ann Craft Trust to help:
- Raise awareness about important safeguarding issues
- Enable more individuals to feel confident recognising signs of abuse and neglect
- Ensure our colleagues have the tools and knowledge to record and report safeguarding concerns.
At Advance, we are proud to be an organisation that takes safeguarding seriously.
Safeguarding is all of our responsibility. It is important that we understand what it is, what it means for customers, staff, families and commissioners and know how it works at Advance.
So, we asked Pete Morgan, Independent Scrutineer on Advance’s Safeguarding Panel, to give us his take on safeguarding – what it is, how we do it Advance and why it is important for all of us.
Today: Understanding the basics
1. ADVANCE: What is Safeguarding?
PETE: "The Care Act 2014 was the first-time legislation was introduced directly to safeguarding adults (previously children were the primary focus), but it does not contain any strict definitions.
Essentially, to me, safeguarding is about enabling people to make decisions for themselves, to live the lives they want to lead and take the risks that they want to take in so far as they have got the capacity to understand the risks and implications to them."
2. ADVANCE: What is the difference between ‘safeguarding’ and keeping people ‘safe’?
PETE: "Not only is there a distinction between keeping people safe and safeguarding, there's also a distinction between a safe service, keeping people safe and safeguarding.
A safe service is one, like Advance, with the processes and procedures in place to ensure it is run safely such as proper recruitment checks, efficient training, regular reviews and supervisions.
Keeping people safe is about a service putting care packages in place to ensure any risks to a customer’s wellbeing are covered and managed.
Safeguarding is about looking into a specific situation where a person may have been put into a position of abuse or neglect. Firstly, you need to check if abuse or neglect has occurred. The second part of safeguarding concerns what you actually do to deal with the abuse or neglect and to stop it happening again in future. The implications for people of the abuse they have experienced is important here. Often people are abused by someone they already have a relationship with so part of safeguarding is supporting people to come to terms with this.
A lot of people think safeguarding is just about going in and dealing with an incident. It is about doing this, but also trying to prevent the chances of that similar incident happening again for the individual and within the organisation as a whole."
3. ADVANCE: Why is Safeguarding important?
PETE: "Firstly, local authorities and agencies like Advance, have a legal duty regarding safeguarding adults under The Care Act 2014.
Secondly, safeguarding means that staff, when working with customers, have sort of ‘legal duckboards’ under their feet in terms of what they can and can’t do when working with people and keeping them safe. This includes ensuring staff report any concerns about abuse and neglect.
Most importantly, of course, safeguarding provides assurance to customers and their families that there are processes in place should abuse or neglect be suspected or occur.
Lastly, being aware of safeguarding is also instrumental in daily life. If you are aware about safeguarding at work, it also means you are going to be aware about safeguarding in the broader community. If you have that knowledge, you can look out for your elderly parents or friends, members of the family and people in the community with a disability, whether learning, physical or sensory, or a mental health condition."
Coming up tomorrow: Our approach to Safeguarding
Find out more:
The Ann Craft Trust are putting on a series of free webinars this week focusing on various forms of abuse and exploitation. If you have time, do sign up and go along!
Monday 21 November - ACT AGM 2022 plus self-harm & safeguarding adults seminar. More info >>
Thursday 24 November - Using the power your role gives you to create safer and stronger cultures. More info >>
Friday 25 November - DBS - Safer and fairer recruitment when working with adults at risk. More info >>
If you want to read up more about a specific Safeguarding topic, take a look on the Ann Craft Trust’s website https://www.anncrafttrust.org/resources/