Jennifer Hickson is Group Safeguarding and Quality Governance Manager at Dimensions. In a guest blog for Safeguarding Adults Week, she explains how sharing is key to preventing abuse and protecting people.
Dimensions is a big organisation. Our 7000 colleagues already work in about half of all local authorities in England and Wales and with many ICBs.
Our size should give us unrivalled ability to learn from an incident in one place and take preventative measures everywhere else. Sharing this learning is key to preventing abuse and protecting people.
But all too often, even today, that learning isn’t fully applied everywhere. So in this article I’ll talk about some of the ways we try to learn, and improve. I hope there’s a nugget here for you to take away. But equally, if you think we’re missing a trick, please drop me a line and let’s have a chat. We can safeguard people better, together.
A Positive Mindset
Safeguarding is a topic that can make people feel nervous. People might assume that there is something that someone has done wrong. But at Dimensions, we encourage people to believe in great outcomes for the people we support through safeguarding work.
To promote this positive mindset Dimensions publishes positive safeguarding outcome stories. These are anonymised stories based on real events. They capture the essence of the safeguarding risk to a person we support. They include the work that was done by colleagues in our organisation, the partnership working beyond, and how the outcome of the safeguarding has created positive changes for the person we support; how we have helped them move on in a positive way.
In addition to sharing how potential abuse has been identified, supporting the person to be central to decision making and addressing any preventable harm, these stories have included topics such as:
- Speaking up when not satisfied that a person’s desired outcomes have been met.
- Challenging professionals to use the Mental Capacity Act appropriately
- Using Local Authority escalation procedures to speed up action
- Working collaboratively on financial independence with circles of support
- Supporting people to take positive risks
These stories are shared through our bulletins and are available on our intranet. We invite colleagues to reflect on similar situations in their own areas, and learn from the stories. A Registered Manager told us:
“I personally find the Positive Safeguarding Outcome Stories uplifting and reassuring. The support and information provided is invaluable as we can all use this platform to share our own experiences and ideas to further improve the support we provide.”
Celebrating safeguarding together
We come together once every two years to celebrate positive safeguarding stories. We celebrate increases in incident reporting, and we celebrate change. And we also celebrate transformational improvements in people’s lives.
Celebrating safeguarding might sound counterintuitive, but it works. It helps us tackle unspoken fears while reducing barriers to reporting. It enables open discussion, which means it supports learning behaviours.
So could you celebrate safeguarding more?
I’d love to hear how your organisation approaches learning from safeguarding. Get in touch: safeguardingteam@dimensions-uk.org