Agenda item

To review the activity of the Adults’ Safeguarding Board April 2017 to March 2018.

The Independent Chair, who was appointed in January 2018, presented the draft annual report. The report was an amalgamation of work from the agencies involved as well as contributions from the groups and sub-groups of the Croydon Safeguarding Adult Board (CSAB).

The priorities set for 2018/19 was to build on the work of the priorities from 2017/18 which were deemed to be good strategic priorities and included the following:

•Prevention and early identification of adults as risk of abuse

•Improved commissioning of services

•Improved and effective communication with residents, boards, partnerships and agencies

•Voice of service users to be central to the work of the CSAB

•Safeguarding to be at the heart of commissioning and delivery of services.

It was also noted that more work was needed to ensure the involvement of BME groups in the work of the CSAB and that improved engagement with colleagues would enhance the quality and increase the number of referrals.

It was commented that the report highlighted that 18% more female than male experienced abuse but the report was not explicit in stating what types of abuse was experienced and as a result there was no real sense of what the main issues were.

A Member commended the work that had been done to highlight the serious illness of hoarding and praised the Council for championing this area of focus.

A Member questioned what had been done to address some of the issues identified through the feedback received from the interviews post safeguarding process, in particular where the feedback stated:

 ‘Worse part of the process was being anxious to attend meeting, communication poor, drawn out process and length of safeguarding processes.’

The officer responded that they were investing in communication, training and development of sub-groups. The information received was fed back to staff, through training and development in order to improve practice over time.

It was suggested that it would have been useful if the report had contained comparative figures for other local authorities on the safeguarding referrals received during 2017/18 as it was difficult to determine if the figures for enquiries that turned into substantiated referrals were average figures. The officer stated that this cross matching of data was not common practice and that it was important to note that conversion rates of referrals to investigation was more about the level of understanding of what a safeguarding referral was, additionally it was difficult to compare figures with other local authorities due to complexities and uniqueness of each borough.

A Member stated that in relation to learning and development of staff, the report suggested that there was a low uptake of e-learning. Officers replied that whilst e-learning had its benefits,  it was important for staff to have more face to face training and staff were being encouraged to sign up for these sessions.

A Member enquired about the lessons learnt from the Ofsted report on Croydon Children’s Services. Officers advised that it had resulted in a refocus of the whole service and an internal independent audit had been completed for areas such as staff caseload and management support.This had resulted in appropriate measures being put in place to address areas highlighted as being of concern.

In response to a Member query on the effectiveness of partnerships in Croydon and how a judgement could be made on its strengths, officers advised that partnerships working in the borough was good and there was strong evidence of engagement across the organisation. Additionally evidence contained in dashboards would be more reliable and management would be able to supply accurate narrative of the evidence. Risk registers would also highlight what was required to improve outcomes and this would evidence the work of the partnerships.

Officers informed the Sub-Committee that the sub-groups were exploring ways of effective engagement with BME groups to ensure that they were kept up to date with safeguarding procedure, measures and channels of reporting.

It was agreed that more work was needed to improve upon communication of awareness of safeguarding issues in areas such as domestic violence by working with council partners such as trading standards as well as businesses in the community to promote increased awareness amongst staff.

The Chair thanked officers for attending to answer questions, and for the opportunity to feed into the report before being presented at Cabinet.

In reaching its recommendations, the Sub-Committee reached the following CONCLUSIONS:

1. The Sub-Committee commended the report, noting that it was very detailed and informative.

2. Croydon was to be congratulated for highlighting the serious issue of Hoarding and should be proud of championing exposure of this serious illness.

3. The report should have provided a clearer breakdown of the different types of abuse experiences by service users.

4. The report did not fully highlight the effectiveness of partnerships and further evidence of strong partnership would be useful in the report.

The Sub-Committee RESOLVED to recommend that:

1. Figures on safeguarding referrals made by internal and external organisations to be provided to the Sub-Committee.

2. Evidence of outcome of partnerships to be presented in 2018/19 report