GO Online: Inspection toolkit

Safeguarding

People need to feel safe and safeguarding people is central to good quality care. It’s important that regulated providers understand what feeling safe means to the people you support.

The following film provides a summary of this area of inspection. It can help you and your teams learn about what will be inspected and what is important to demonstrate to deliver good or outstanding care.

Safeguarding

• We can evidence how we support people to feel safe.
• We involve people who need care and support in discussions about their safety. We understand what makes people feel safe and document this in care plans.
• We use ongoing assessment to monitor how a person who needs care and support might be at risk of harm and how this could be avoided or minimised.
• We ensure staff are trained to proactively recognise and report bullying, harassment, abuse and challenge discrimination. Our managers regularly check staff understanding.
• We use non-discriminatory practice at all times in the protection of individual's age, colour, culture, disability, ethnicity, gender, medical condition, nationality, appearance, race, religion, sexual identity, sexual orientation, or social class.
• We ensure our day-to-day practice complies with the Mental Capacity Act and Liberty Protection Safeguards.
• Our managers and staff teams are empowered and supported to whistle blow, knowing their concerns will be thoroughly investigated.
• We ensure safeguarding notifications are sent to CQC as required.
• We ensure our safeguarding policies and procedures are aligned to the latest good or best practice, including local requirements.
• We ensure our frontline managers and team members as appropriate are in regular contact with their local safeguarding team.
• We do not hesitate to seek advice to discuss safeguarding thresholds with external agencies.
• We ensure all safeguarding incidents are thoroughly investigated in an open and transparent way.
• We clearly document evidence of safeguarding incidents, including how they were dealt with, which agencies were involved (where relevant), what follow up action was undertaken, and how learning was shared.
• Our organisation regularly reviews safeguarding incidents to identify trends.
• We ensure staff and people who need care and support know how to ‘blow the whistle’ on poor practice (both internally and to external agencies) without recrimination.
• Our staff are confident that any concerns they raise would be listened to, taken seriously and be responded to with the appropriate actions.
• We have a safeguarding champion (or champions), whose role is to be a specialist in this area, researching best practice and providing staff with advice and support.
• We regularly include safeguarding discussions in staff supervisions and team meetings.

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