Making Safeguarding Core Business - Our work with NHS England

Related Sector: Health & Social Care

Making Safeguarding ‘Core Business’ across the NHS

Safeguarding is everybody’s business. It means protecting people’s health, wellbeing and human rights, enabling them to live free from harm, abuse and neglect. Safeguarding sits within a legal framework with statutory duties and guidance for all health professionals. It is fundamental to high-quality patient care.

The human cost of getting safeguarding wrong is high, and health professionals are often the first that can identify and raise safeguarding concerns.

However, safeguarding has historically been seen as an ‘add-on’ to clinical practice, leaving unknown numbers at risk.

To address this, NHSE/I partnered with Bond Solon to design and deliver a nationwide training programme for Executive and Clinical Leads which aims at instilling the core legal knowledge and understanding to ensure that safeguarding is not ‘additional’ work, but paramount to protecting the most vulnerable in society.

Working Together to define targets

To ensure that the programmes were the most relevant, up-to-date and practical as possible, Bond Solon and NHSE/I selected key personnel to form the Safeguarding Leadership Project Team, including subject matter experts from both sides.

Overall responsibility of the Project Team was to agree desired results and outcomes of the project, and to ensure these were met. In order to achieve this, a scoping exercise was conducted to ascertain the current level of skills and knowledge of the target audience and importantly the desired levels NHSE/I requires.

Desired Results and Aim of Partnership

The nationwide programme is designed to:

• Embed Safeguarding across the NHS,
• Align the culture, ethos and attitude to make safeguarding core-business,
• Protect NHS organisations against possible consequences of getting it wrong, including, regulatory, reputational damage and/or litigation.

The Courses

Since September 2018 Bond Solon have delivered two safeguarding leadership courses aimed at Senior and Executive Leaders of the NHS:

• Clinical Leadership in Safeguarding - Designed to ensure safeguarding is core business’ alongside clinical practice
• Executive Leadership in Safeguarding – Designed to equip Senior Executives to take the safeguarding lead within the 10-year plan, and that the legal framework is being applied appropriately

Over 1,500 senior NHS leaders have already attended the Bond Solon NHS Safeguarding courses.

Why Bond Solon

We were a natural partner of choice for NHS England as we are already recognised as the UK’s leading legal-skills and safeguarding training company for healthcare professionals, training 5,000 health and social care professionals each year in their legal and safeguarding duties.

We are passionate about helping safeguarding children, adults at risk and patients, by ensuring that the Health and Social Care Professionals responsible for their care can carry out their frontline duties lawfully, confidently and to best practice.

NHSE/I partnered with Bond Solon to design and deliver a nationwide training programme for the Executive and Clinical Leads which aims influencing and changing the ethos of safeguarding across the NHS. The feedback from systems leads across the country in the last two years has been outstanding.