Safeguarding Adults Week 2022

Safeguarding Week begins on Monday 21 November this year and will focus on the theme ‘Responding to Contemporary Safeguarding Challenges’.

This week is a time for organisations to come together to raise awareness of important safeguarding issues. To achieve this, each day of the week we will focus on a different safeguarding theme, as set by the Ann Craft Trust, to explore how we can respond to contemporary safeguarding challenges.

Themes for 2022

• Monday – Exploitation and County Lines
• Tuesday – Self-neglect
• Wednesday – Creating Safer Organisational Cultures
• Thursday – Elder Abuse
• Friday – Domestic Abuse in Tech-Society
• Saturday & Sunday – Safeguarding in Everyday Life

Every day of the week, we will be sharing articles and resources with our workforce based on each theme, so they can take 5 minutes each day to learn more about our Safeguarding policies and procedures, and to ensure they feel up to date with the latest information to support their role at our Trust.

To give an insight into each of these themes and how we work with them within our Trust, please explore the summaries provided below:

Exploitation and County Lines

We work closely with our partners across a range of agencies such as Social Care, Police and Probation, to identify and reduce the number of people affected by exploitation and ensuring appropriate safeguarding interventions. This includes attendance at multiagency meetings.

We are also a member of the Humber Modern Slavery Partnership, which is a strategic network of agencies across Humberside that is committed to tackling modern slavery and human trafficking by prosecuting perpetrators, disrupting identified organised crime and supporting victims in or out of the National Referral Mechanism (NRM).

For more information on Exploitation and County Lines, please read the Home Office’s guidance here.

Self-neglect

We work with a wide range of people, with different lived experiences and over a large geographical patch. Our staff work with people who are experiencing self-neglect in a range of settings whether that be via our District Nursing teams in North Yorkshire, or working with people experiencing mental health problems in hospital or in their own homes across Hull and the East Riding of Yorkshire.

Self-neglect is covered in detail within our Safeguarding Adults training that is provided to the appropriate members of staff. Further to this, our dedicated Safeguarding team attends Pressure Ulcer Reviews, Learning Panel Meetings (PURL), and Vulnerable Adults Risk Management (VARM) meetings where appropriate. 

Read a brief introduction to self-neglect by the Social Care Institute for Excellence, here.

Creating Safer Organisational Cultures

As a Trust, we recognise the importance of creating a safe organisational culture and have multiple mechanisms in place to ensure that we are continually reviewing the safety of our services; most importantly we are never complacent and remain professionally curious.

One of the factors that has been identified as contributing to a closed culture is the belief that ‘it couldn’t happen here’. We must accept that there is always a risk of poor practice developing in any organisation. Particularly, this could happen anywhere where we do not create and embed the conditions where our staff, service users, their carers and families, feel supported to raise concerns and discuss openly the challenges of working in health and social care. We are continuously dedicated to ensuring a safer organisational culture and encourage all of our workforce to contact our Freedom To Speak Up team should they not feel comfortable raising a concern with their line manager directly.

Read more about Safer Cultures on the Ann Craft Trust website, here.

Elder Abuse

We work collaboratively with our partner agencies to ensure we are effectively safeguarding older people. We cover a wide range of types of abuse which older people may experience in our safeguarding training sessions and ensure that, no matter someone’s age, the person is at the heart of what we do.

Learn more about protecting yourself and your loved ones from elder abuse on the Age UK website, here.

Domestic Abuse in Tech Society

Within Humber, the subject of tech abuse is included within our Safeguarding training and there is reference to tech abuse within our Domestic Abuse Policy. This information supports our staff to know what to do in the event that they suspect domestic abuse, particularly where the use of technology and devices is concerned.

In addition, support plans and guidance for staff is available for any staff member who is experiencing domestic abuse and we provide additional training to managers who may be supporting a team member experiencing domestic abuse.

Find more information and support with regards to tech abuse on the Refuge website, here.

Safeguarding in Everyday Life

We support the message that ‘safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility’. We continuously remind our workforce that safeguarding does not end once we leave work and that, as a community member, you can help create safer cultures both inside and outside of work.

It is important to use that we continue to build an environment in which our staff can speak up and follow clear procedures when they have concerns about colleagues, service users, their carers and families. It is our goal to support our staff to:

• Learn about the different types of harm and abuse, and how to spot the signs
• Record any concerns they have
• Report the concerns to the appropriate team

To achieve this, we provide safeguarding training and resources to all our members of staff via our internal communications channels and reach out to teams directly to provide additional support as and when it is appropriate to do so.

Get involved

The Ann Craft Trust lead the Safeguarding Adults Week campaign and we recommend taking a look at their website for more information on how you can bring safeguarding into your everyday life. You can also learn more about the daily themes on the website here.

Show your support for Safeguarding Adults Week and the daily themes on social media – you can follow along with our content at @HumberNHSFT