Drug and alcohol abuse, domestic violence, mental illnesses, injury, squalor, criminality, poverty… all known factors used to identify and target children at risk from abuse or neglect. So why are there so many children being let down by the services that are supposed to safeguard their welfare?
Without wanting to touch on this sensitive a subject flippantly; it seems to me to be a common human instinct to want to protect those in need. And, in some respects is that not what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom?
So, how is it then that in this day and age ‘children in need’ identified by public services as being vulnerable are able to slip through the safeguarding net and are allowed to be subjected to abuse or neglect that in a tragically high number of incidences results in their deaths?
Having reviewed the serious case reviews, significant case reviews or multi-agency child practice reviews published in 2015 and Ofsted Serious Incident Notifications 2014/15 report, it is clear that even with Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hubs (MASHs) and Local Safeguarding Children Boards (LSCBs) in the UK, an increasing number of vulnerable children are not getting the protection they should be from the services that are there to defend them.
Now before this sounds like a witch hunt against children’s social services teams, it is not intended to be. I know a few social care workers and I understand the pressures they are up against – it not a job that I would personally be strong enough to do. It is generally not the individual case workers, teachers, health and mental health professionals, the police, youth offending, housing or probation officers that are the cause of the these children falling through the safeguarding cracks – it is the complexity of the information systems and security protocols that leads to breakdowns in communication and poor information sharing that results in these tragedies.
The fact that information about vulnerable children and their families is typically silo-ed in multiple disparate information systems on different networks and governed by different (but not necessarily conflicting) security protocols means there are only two viable mechanisms available to these services to get the full picture:
Surely then, the answer may be to put a central case management system in place that all these individuals could work on?
Well, that would be an answer, but it does pose some significant challenges such as trying to get already incredibility busy and stressed users to learn yet another system. It also poses some security concerns (how do you ensure that all possible users have the right access right while also not opening the system up unnecessarily) and management overhead. And lastly, the delivery of these types of the systems don’t have a very successful track record…
So what is the alternative?
- Physically meet, which means that the information they have could be out of date almost as soon as their meeting finishes
- Use encrypted email, though with so many potential individuals from each service involved in any one case, this isn’t really a robust solution either
The answer, as is very frequent in life, is somewhere in between. A huge investment has already been made by our public services into systems critical to the way they operate. These systems have been configured to allow their users to access the information that they are allowed, and the users know how to use them. Therefore, why ask the users to change and why try to replicate their security in another system? Why not enable these systems to seamlessly share information (via a central hub) based on predetermined centralised rules and permissions. This hub, alongside orchestrating the real time information flow, would also be the central repository of the aggregated audit information to ensure the full transparency of the safeguarding process.
In this way, any GP within a practice could access the latest cross agency information through their GP Clinical IT System on a vulnerable child in advance of seeing him or her. If that child is waiting in their practice’s reception as an emergency appointment and they suspect, post consultation, that the child’s condition is due to abuse or neglect then they could update their cross agency peers directly through the same system; which in turn would push this information, in near real time, to their peers’ native systems too, so that all key stakeholders have the latest information on which to base any safeguarding decision for that ‘child in need’ on.
So, given we are lucky enough to live in the golden age of digital, which brings with it new economies and communication channels, is it a step too far to ask when during this technology revolution will it be used to protect those in need?
The author of this article is Richard Clarke, VP Connect Solutions and was originally posted on the Objective Connect LinkedIn Showcase page.
