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Pointers for Practice: How to Apply the Safeguarding Process to Practice

Whether identifying concerns or making assessments to establish care, support and safety needs, practitioners should follow a similar process. However, the task will vary. For example, the aims and objectives will be different for a practitioner in a family centre who is identifying concerns, to the aims and objectives of a multidisciplinary assessment and intervention to safeguard a child at risk.

The over-arching process is shown in Table 3. Each stage is considered in general terms below.

Hypothesising and Gathering Information

Consciously or unconsciously, whether reporting abuse or initiating enquiries in response to a report, practitioners begin by hypothesising or theorising as to whether the child or adult is at risk of harm. What is causing me to think the individual is at risk of harm? And to confirm or refute the hypothesis practitioners need to obtain information. Information-gathering begins by considering: what do I know?

Making sense of the information

Having gathered the information, the next stage in the process is deciding what does this information tell me about the child I consider at risk of harm? Does it confirm or refute the hypothesis? Do I need to test further, consult and/or consider alternative hypothesises?

At this stage, irrespective of the reason for the assessment, there are questions that the practitioner should ask of themselves:

diagram1

Diagram 1 the identification, assessment, planning, intervention and review process

Decision-making and planning

At this point in the process practitioners should be asking: _w_hat do I need to do, taking into account my role and responsibilities to protect, care and support the child? Are immediate actions necessary?

In the same way that the information gathered should be proportionate so should the response.

The following questions should be considered:

Action/ Intervention

Actions should be designed to ensure the child is no longer at risk of harm and their care and support needs are being met. Practitioners should be asking themselves: how will the identified actions - immediate and longer-term - contribute to keeping the child safe and improving their lived experience?

At this stage the 5 ‘Ws’ should be considered (the application to different responses to risk of harm are considered in the relevant sections). Practitioners and the adult or the child at risk and their family and carers must reach a shared understanding of the following:

  1. Why interventions are taking place and how they are designed to achieve identified person-centred outcomes
  2. What interventions will be undertaken to achieve the desired outcomes and the rationale for these interventions. For example, why the parent should attend a parenting programme
  3. Who is expected to do what? This is essential so that both practitioners and the family understand exactly what is expected of them as part of the intervention and how these actions should achieve the desired outcomes.
  4. When this will happen. It is useful to agree timescales with measures of progress.
  5. Where interventions will take place.

Evaluation

What have not been achieved, then the process will need to be revised or start again.

Have the agreed person-centred outcomes been achieved? What evidence do we have? If the outcomes have not been achieved what should happen?

These questions are important to ensure presumptions are not made that the risk of harm has reduced without evidence to support this. Practitioners should consider the following: