Safeguarding Week, 20th - 24th June 2022
Safeguarding Week is taking place across West Yorkshire from 20th-24th June 2022.
Please use this week to promote awareness of safeguarding with people who use your services, staff teams and volunteers.
This year, Leeds Safeguarding Adults Board's theme is support for people who self-neglect.
We have arranged some on-line 'Self neglect Best Practice Briefings' with expert speakers. These are free to anyone who would like to attend, please take up this opportunity.
Our Ask, is that each day during Safeguarding Week you:
Make our Message of the Day Resources available to your staff teams
Posted 30th May 2022
Consultation on our Strategic Plan 2022/23
We are consulting on our plans for next year. We are keen to hear your views; tell us what you think our priorities should be. Please complete the survey on our Consultations page, available until the 3rd June.
Posted 30th May 2022
LSAB Briefing: People living street-based lives
This briefing relates to what we have learned about people who live street-based lives and what we can do differently to improve how we support and safeguard individuals. It is based on the extensive work undertaken by the Leeds Safeguarding Adults Board in relation to self-neglect including a Thematic Review of People Living a Street Based Life and learning from Safeguarding Adults Reviews.
Did you know that…?
In 2017 there were an estimated 597 deaths of homeless people in England and Wales. Men made up 84% of deaths of homeless people and over half of all deaths were due to 3 causes: drug poisoning (40%), liver disease (9%) and suicide (13%). Street-based life activity includes begging, street drinking, street-based drug use and street-based sex work. People leading street-based lives have a range of housing and support needs and are often vulnerable or contribute to the vulnerability of others. Leading a street-based life can increase the risk of street homelessness. Street-based life activity is often highly visible and causes concerns for local communities. The majority of people living street-based lives felt unsafe, citing reports of assault, theft and feeling vulnerable (both from fellow rough sleepers and the wider community).
Read the full briefing here
Posted 5th April 2022
Professional Curiosity Guidance
Professional curiosity is where a practitioner seeks to explore and understand what is happening in someone's life, rather than making assumptions or accepting what they are told at face value. It involves looking out for signs that things are not right and seeking out the evidence of what is really happening.
Professional curiosity is a core responsibility of all practitioners. Many people are unable, or feel unable, to speak up for themselves. Many people are relying on us to identify the signs, to uncover what is really happening in their life, and to provide them with help to be safe. This is why it is so important.
For this reason, we have published new guidance to promote professionally curious practice, and to support practitioners to manage difficult conversations within their work.
Posted 17th March 2022
Learning and Development Framework
Our new safeguarding learning and development framework sets out the expectations and requirements of all organisations in Leeds so as to ensure that the workforce is supported and enabled to provide for the needs of citizens in Leeds. For more information, go to our dedicated Webpage
Posted 16th March 2022
Friends of the Board network
Leeds Safeguarding Adults Board highly values our links with people and communities across the city. We feel it is essential that we hear from people in Leeds about what is important to them and find ways to focus our work on what people in Leeds are saying. That is why we have introduced the Friends of the Board network.
Our Friends of the Board network provides opportunities for the Board to hear citizens' voices either directly, or via community organisations, services, groups, and networks.
It also provides for them to support and contribute to the Board's work and ambitions, for example by helping us raise public awareness about abuse and neglect and how people can get the help and support they need.
Membership
The Friends of the Board is an informal network and membership is voluntary. Members are sought from:
• Community organisations, services, groups, and networks that can support and enable the Board to reach different communities in Leeds
• Members of the public with experience of care and support or safeguarding adults services
People who wish to explore being a member of the Friends of the Board Network should contact the Board Strategy Unit: LSAB@leeds.gov.uk
Posted 15th March 2022
Updates to our Multi-Agency Safeguarding Adults Policy and Procedures 2021
As a Safeguarding Adults Board, we need to regularly review our arrangements that support and protect people to be safe from abuse, neglect and self-neglect. In recent weeks and months we have been reviewing and consulting on improvements that we can make to our multi-agency safeguarding adults policy and procedures.
Many thanks to all those individuals, organisations and forums that sent us comments and suggestions. These have been extremely helpful and we have given each of these careful consideration and included them as best we can.
As a result of this work we are now making some small but important changes that we believe will improve the robustness of our procedures and how we all work together to support people to be safe in Leeds. These changes take effect from 19th July 2021.
Click here for the new Leeds Multi-agency Safeguarding Adults Policy and Procedures 2021
We have included a summary of these changes below:
1. To make the multi-agency policy and procedures easier for people to read and use, we reduced the length of these documents. We hope that all agencies will find this helpful.
2. To improve our policy, we have included more information about legal frameworks and included better links to other LSAB documents in relation to Information Sharing; People in Positions of Trust and our Self-neglect policy.
3. To support consistency of practice nationally we will now only use the term 'Information Gathering' to describe the work of Local Authority: Social Work Teams to decide whether the safeguarding procedures should be followed. These decisions will continue to be based upon the Care Act 2014 and Care and Support Statutory Guidance.
4. To support Social Work Teams we have revised the Information Gathering Form for their use. Where used this will assist social workers in recording information or conversations with other agencies, that enable them to decide if the safeguarding procedures should be followed.
5. Again to support national consistency of practice, once a decision has been made to follow the safeguarding procedures we will now always describe any activity in relation to deciding what, if any, safeguarding arrangements are needed for a person as an Enquiry.
6. To support the need for proportionate enquiries, when facts are immediately established and safeguarding planning only involves confirming safeguarding arrangements or making small changes to care and support arrangements, the social worker may decide to record this on the Enquiry Section of the new Information Gathering Form.
7. To support providers in the undertaking of enquiries, we have introduced a new Provider Enquiry Report form. This will replace the Record of Safeguarding Response Form. This new form will look and feel very similar to previous report formats but it also includes an introductory letter that explains what is being requested. We again hope that this will prove helpful.
8. To recognise the importance of all safeguarding enquiries, we have decided to change the name of the Formal Enquiry Report, to Independent Enquiry Report. We were concerned that 'formal' may imply that other forms of enquiry are in some way less important, which is not the case. All safeguarding enquires are of equal importance, its just that different formats or approaches may be necessary to reflect individual circumstances and needs of the person at risk. Now that we have introduced a Provider Enquiry Report, the Independent Enquiry Format will be used solely by Local Authority Social Work Teams.
9. To ensure the person at risk's voice is always heard, we have maintained our citizen-led approach. The advice and expectations of Leeds Citizens permeates all our policy and procedures, which should be considered practice guidance for all practitioners and agencies.
10. To ensure that we continue to learn from citizen experiences, we continue to ask all organisations to assist the person at risk to give feedback of their experience of support within these procedures. This will help us to improve them in the future. Information about the project for citizens and practitioners / organisations is available here: 'Talk to me, Hear my safeguarding story project'. The online survey (and information about other ways to provide feedback) is available here: https://smartsurvey.co.uk/s/lfs2020
Posted 29th June 2021
Key messages about Self-neglect from Safeguarding Adults Reviews in Leeds
During June 2021 we published our key messages from our learning about self-neglect.
"ALWAYS Care" - ALWAYS respond to self-neglect, small steps make a big difference:
Awareness, Look for the person, What is really happening? Assess the risk, Your time to act, Solutions focussed
Find out more about this on our Safeguarding Week 2021 page.
Posted 29th June 2021
New LSAB Bulletin
The Safeguarding Adults Board has now launched an e-bulletin to help practitioners, services and organisations up to date with local and national safeguarding developments. We would be pleased if you signed up to our bulletin to receive future news and updates:
New: Safeguarding Adults Bulletin (govdelivery.com) – to see our latest bulletin
Or simply subscribe here, for future ones: Leeds City Council - Destination (govdelivery.com)
Posted 30th June 2021
Board Strategic Plan for 2021/22
The Safeguarding Adults Board has now published its Strategic Plan for 2021/22. Thank you to everyone who took part in the consultation on our priorities. For information about our plans for the year ahead, please go to our Strategic Plan webpage.
Posted 29th June 2021
