Safeguarding

The trust has a statutory duty to safeguard children and adults at risk who access our services.

The trust is committed to ensuring that there are effective safeguarding arrangements in place across its footprint to prevent and protect our patients from abuse or harm regardless of their circumstances.

To ensure that those who access our services are appropriately safeguarded and that assurance is provided to our commissioners and partners a variety of documents are produced and circulated. These documents are generated from both internal and external sources.

Think family approach

A multi-agency approach is required to ensure that our patients are appropriately safeguarded. This involves partnership working with both families and professionals from an operational to a strategic level across the trust footprint in Rotherham, Doncaster, and North Lincolnshire.

The trust has a dedicated Safeguarding team compromising of experts from a variety of professional backgrounds. The team promotes a “think family” approach to safeguarding and supports staff to ensure that the trust meets its statutory requirements.

The safeguarding team offers:

• supervision
• advice, support, and guidance
• the facilitation of mandatory and bespoke training
• audits
• development of internal policies and procedures
• liaison with Patient Safety team

All trust staff are offered training, commensurate to their post, to support them to recognise safeguarding issues and understand the process to follow, to protect children, young people, and adults at risk.

The safeguarding team support with local multi-agency safeguarding arrangements by attending the children’s and adults safeguarding boards, contributing to safeguarding adults reviews (SARs), domestic homicide reviews (DHRs), child safeguarding practice reviews (CSPRs), child death reviews (CDRs), and the development of multi-agency policies, procedures and participation in multi-agency learning events.

Section 11 audit

Section 11 of the Children Act (2002) places a statutory duty on key organisations to self-assess the extent to which they meet the safeguarding requirements and standards. The trust is therefore required to complete a self-assessment and provide evidence of how we comply with section 11 when undertaking our daily business. The audit gives an indication and assurance of how well we are working to keep children safe. The audits are repeated every other year so that agencies have time to prepare and submit evidence, formulate action plans and to address any service shortfalls etc.

Page last reviewed: September 30, 2024
Next review due: September 30, 2025