Safeguarding In Health And Social Care Essay

When looking at children and young people’s development it is important to recognise and respond to concerns to ensure that the child or young person receives the help and assistance needed.

A health visitor plays a big part in all stages of a child protection process including case reviews.

A child will be assessed by an educational psychologist if there are concerns about their intellectual, communication and behavioural development. Assessments can be arranged by the SENCO or independently. The aim of the assessments is to find out why the child is not progressing and what support is needed in order for them to progress. Specific learning difficulties are often identified in this way such as Dyslexia, AHAD, Dyspraxia. Support and targets for the child are then set to help them achieve. The outcome of the assessments may involve the child referred to other professionals e.g. occupational therapist, optometrist, speech and language therapist, psychiatrist. The psychologist will advise the school on how to promote development for example, keeping verbal instructions simple. Keep stories and group activities short to match attention span.

Most children get all the help and support they need from their family, teachers, health practitioners and the wider community, but some may need additional support and that is where the ‘named person' steps in.

The importance of interagency working in the safeguarding and protection of children in the UK

If a child needs extra help, the Common Assessment Framework helps us with timely and early intervention, as colleagues trust one another`s assessments. The CAF is particularly suitable for use in universal services, such as health and education so that problems can be tackled before they become serious. The CAF enables the nursery and other agencies to communicate and work together more

Bracknell Forest Council (2012) explained early intervention as “referring to a way of working which will ensure that children, young people and families who are at risk or vulnerable to poor outcomes are identified early and that those needs are effectively assessed and met by agencies working together. The aim being to prevent their escalation rather than to respond only when the difficulty has become so acute as to demand attention”.

There are a number of agencies which may be involved when working in the context of safeguarding, which means that it’s important that everyone communicates and works in a partnership which ensures the safety and protection of children. Each area of expertise may need to have an input in any one case, and each case should be considered when discussing issues surrounding safeguarding. A working party of ‘team around the child’ meeting may be called involving a number of agencies in order to discuss how to move forward in a child’s best interests.

Assessment forms a key component in the process of working with families. Assessing children and their families has been carried out using a range of different approaches over the past few decades, as discussed by Holland (2004). Knowing which assessment is needed is complex as the assessment is the first in a chain of many events and can often determine the success of any future work and intervention with the family. It could also be difficult to determine which assessment is needed because of the fact that each case is context specific and therefore vulnerability levels need to be established before assessment is carried out. With any assessment, it is carried out by a lead professional and is therefore prone to human errors, adding to the difficulties of working with families. The core assessment provides a systematic basis for collecting and analysing information to support professional judgements about how to help children and families in the best interest of the child. One specific form of assessment is the Common Assessment Framework which is used across all children’s services and all local areas. It is designed to begin to address the problems that need to be solved within the family situation. This particular

Care routines also help the practitioner to know what has been done and what needs doing next. In most early year’s settings, babies are assigned to a key worker, a key worker forms good relationships with the baby and their parents and are responsible for getting to know the child personally and knowing their abilities, needs and preferences and then each key worker creates individual learning plans for each baby. Key workers must observe the baby regularly and record information about the baby to plan appropriate activities to push them to the next level of development. Key workers are also important when communicating and sharing information with parents and carers, and when necessary, other professionals. This is important as the key worker will know the child better than others within the setting and will be aware of all development areas and issues that may affect the baby’s development or behaviour. Key workers should be able to gain the trust of the baby and the parents so that they can come to the key worker with any problems, if the baby trusts the key worker they will have a positive relationships and the baby will be settled and comfortable around them. If the baby is comfortable in the setting and trusts the key worker and other practitioners he will be confident and will try new things in order to develop further.

They believe the system should be child centred allowing them then to be part of decisions made about their life. Expressing their views needs and wants. Professional should listen to what the child has to tell and this should help proceedings get dealt with quickly. This is very similar to the Munro (2011). After Munro (2011) released her review the working together to safeguard children (2010) was revised and largely cut down. Taking on board many of Munro's (2011) points resulting in a new Working together to safeguard children ( 2013) version. In this statutory guidance all non-statutory guidance has been removed. This now states that child protection is everyone’s responsibility to the end of their known role where if a concern is raised it will be passed onto whomever is the next professional to work with. Working with other professionals is seen to be of high importance to maintain the best outcome for the child though sharing information. This guidance sees the importance in regular meetings about cases to discuss concerns and come to a joint decision involving everyone’s perceptive. These meeting will work well as long as it is child centred and there voice heard like Munro (2011) suggests. These meetings will make the system more responsive with shorter time scales add in. To keep professional at high child centred ability they will

When working in early intervention you tend to see tons of children, some typical and others not. How do we distinguish these students? Each child is different and the support required for them varies. There are a series of tests that can be administered for your child if you have concerns and anyone can recommend you for testing or an evaluation. The earlier the better.

This agency aims to help children birth to five, pregnant women, and their families. The program is child-focused, with the aim for school readiness of young children of low-income families. This is a long-standing program that has helped many children and parents become successful in their lives. To achieve this, Headstart programs support a child’s growth in a positive learning environment through a variety of services. The generalist practitioner can use their skills to help teach the parents strategies to use, guide them to resources available, and be there to listen. Through these strategies, the in-home visitor will help with social skills, language development and make sure the child is progressing in all aspects of development. For the parents, the in-home visitor will connect parents with resources for medical, dental and mental health services to support the family. Headstart also supports the strength-based learning to heighten the parent and child relationships and to help parents engage in the child’s learning environment. The one question I would have is, “How do we decide, when the need is so

There are a number of different agencies which may be involved when working in the context of safeguarding and protection of children and it is vital that these agencies communicate and work in partnership. Each professional working with children has to respect the others’ areas of expertise and support others’ work as everybody is making a valuable contribution to the pupils’ development. To make sure that these professionals and agencies work together effectively in order to safeguard children, section 10 of the Children Act 2004 places the duty on local authorities to make arrangements to promote cooperation to improve the wellbeing of all children in the authority’s area.

Working together to safeguard children 2013 has stated that no single professional can have a full picture of a child 's need. This reiterates the importance of integrated working and inter departmental cooperation. The common assessment framework is to help identify the needs of vulnerable children. They are to help professionals asses the needs of children and also to enable families to receive the appropriate intervention. The CAF summary presents information for multi agency meeting when dealing with a case. Partnership working in the context of safeguarding means that for us to promote the safeguarding and well-being of children, it also depends on effective partnership working between professionals such as health,education, children 's social care workers, voluntary workers and agencies including justice services. Professionals and agencies have different roles and expertise and it is important for them and us to be able to work together,effectively to intervene and help vulnerable children. For example we have the