Safeguarding: What is Safeguarding and why it is important in workplace?

What is Safeguarding?

By this article, you may have a clear concept on Safeguarding and why Safeguarding is important in workplace and what are the principles of Safeguarding.

Safeguarding refers to the actions, policies and procedures that create and maintain a culture of safe and protective environments for all, including our paid and volunteer staff, contractors, partners and the communities we seek to serve.

Safeguarding means

1. To prevent harm to an adult's and children's health and/or development
2. To protect children and adult from abuse and maltreatment
3. To ensure children grow up with the provision of safe and effective care
4. To take action to enable all children and adult to have the best outcomes.

Organization should adopts safeguarding practices within the organization to ensure its employees, volunteers, partners, vendors and other representatives do not intentionally harm or abuse children or adults in affected communities.

Why Safeguarding is important?

Everyone has a right to live their lives free from fear, abuse and neglect and, if you work with or around vulnerable groups, you have a responsibility to protect their safety and basic human rights.

Missing warning signs could have serious consequences and leave vulnerable individuals open to abuse, neglect and exploitation. Poor safeguarding or a lack of safeguarding within your organisation could result in:

• Cases of abuse and neglect being missed.
• An increase in the cases or severity of abuse and neglect if they go unnoticed.
• Vulnerable adults and children being treated with a lack of compassion or empathy.
• Increased confusion and distress for individuals who are suffering but do not know who to talk to. This could adversely impact their behaviour, so you might notice more outbursts.
• Loss of dignity and liberty for vulnerable adults.

The Safeguarding Principles:

The UK government crated following six safeguarding principles to help better protect vulnerable individuals and which have been agreed upon within the Care Act 2014:

Empowerment: Ensuring people are confident and supported in making their own decisions and giving informed consent. Empowerment gives individuals choice and control over decisions that are made. For example, a vulnerable person should be able to give permission for medical treatment with complete knowledge of the potential outcomes.

For a vulnerable person to make these kinds of decisions, you should ensure that they are given all necessary information in an objective manner. Services should also be tailored to the specific needs of the vulnerable adult you are working with. You could, for instance, ask them what their desired outcome to a situation would be and plan your response around their wishes.

The Empowerment principle ensures that their thoughts, feelings and opinions are taken into consideration. Unless they do not have the capacity to make decisions, they should always have control over their own choices.

Protection: Providing support and representation for those greatest in need. Organisations can implement measures to prevent abuse from occurring and support those at risk.

Under this principle, organisations and individuals should understand safeguarding processes and best practice. They will need to know what to do if they have a safeguarding concern, how to stop danger from happening or escalating, and how to provide help and support to the vulnerable person who requires it.

Accessible training, education and communication between people and organisations can all help to ensure people know how to deal with safeguarding concerns, and in turn can protect those at risk.

Prevention: It is imperative to act before harm occurs, preventing neglect, harm or abuse. Organisations work to prevent abuse from happening by raising awareness, staff training and making information accessible. They also encourage individuals to ask for help if they feel at risk.

Where there are signs that abuse, harm or neglect could occur, it is essential that action is taken to stop a person being put in danger.

To make this possible, it is important to raise awareness of who may be more likely to become vulnerable. For example, a vulnerable adult can include those with mental or physical disabilities, those with chronic or terminal illness, and the elderly.

It is also important to be able to recognise the signs of abuse, harm and neglect. For this, thorough safeguarding training is crucial. Advice and information around safeguarding must also be easily accessible and communicated with others, so that any signs can be recognised and acted on as early as possible.

Proportionality: Ensure that the way you deal with a safeguarding issue is proportional to the risk presented. As a general rule, it is important to respond using the least intrusive method. However, to ensure that a safeguarding concern is dealt with in the most appropriate way, you will need to properly assess the risk presented.

Ask yourself, how likely is abuse, harm or neglect to occur? And how severe is the situation? Some situations may only need a small amount of intervention, whereas severe risks (such as where a person’s life is in danger) would necessitate an urgent, more invasive response. Always act in the best interests of the vulnerable person.

Partnership: Forming partnerships with local communities can create solutions as they can assist in preventing and detecting abuse.

The Partnership principle encourages collaboration between organisations and local communities.

Organisations are advised to raise awareness around safeguarding issues. If local communities understand how abuse, harm and neglect can be spotted, prevented, and reported, then vulnerable people living in that community stand a better chance of being protected.

Organisations can also share relevant information about a vulnerable person with other organisations and the local community, as long as it is absolutely necessary to keep that person safe.

Accountability: Everybody has a responsibility to keep others safe. If you are in contact with someone who may be vulnerable, it is your duty to recognise, record, respond and report any safeguarding concerns. This includes if you are that person’s career, doctor, social worker, or even if you are a friend, relative or colleague.

To ensure accountability, it is helpful to establish clear roles and responsibilities around safeguarding within the workplace. That way, everyone understands exactly what they need to do when it comes to keeping people in their circle safe.

In conclusion, we can say that, Safeguarding is organizational (everyone) responsibilities to ensure that those working within or with organizations are safe and free from harm which caused by organizations. Organizational internal policies, procedures and measures can prevent harm to staff, children and adults (communities).

Definition of CHILD and ADULT

Child: In line with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)1, 1989, under the Policy a child is defined as anyone who has not reached their 18th birthday.

Although the national laws in countries that we work in may have different ages at which a child is considered an adult, or at which a child can give consent or is responsible, we use the definition of a child according to international law as set out in the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

Adult: An adult at risk is defined as:
• any person aged 18 years or over
• who identifies themselves as unable to take care of themselves or protect themselves against significant harm, exploitation or neglect;
• or are understood to be at risk, which may be due to frailty, homelessness, mental or physical health problems, learning or physical impairments, and/or impacted by disasters or conflicts.