Adult safeguarding is something that many social workers in palliative care take on for their hospices or teams. A new report summarises the lessons from serious case reviews like the reviews that are done (with a rather greater public profile) on children whose safeguarding goes wrong. It does not look at the reviews, but at the process of getting the reviews done, although it does say something about some of the reviews done in the case of deaths or sexual abuse of vulnerable adults.

Amazingly, there is no national system for checking up on these reviews, but there has been nearly a hundred, with the maximum number in any area of four. Often, cheapo cheapo, they do not have independent chairs. There was considerable variation in how the local safeguarding boards decided to have a review. It looks from the feedback as though local pcts and hospitals were particularly uncooperative, although most agencies were prepared to be involved; another sign that people in the health service would still rather not know about this sort of nasty.

The study of prevalence of adult abuse among older people a few years ago showed that on average a hospice might get 3-4% of its older patients being abused. I think most hospices don’t get anything like these numbers turning up, which suggests that we are missing a lot, and many older people and perhaps other patients and family members are being distressed by abuse that we are not picking up.

Worth reading:

Jill Manthorpe and Stephen Martineau (2009) Serious Case Reviews in Adult Safeguarding. London: Social Care Workforce Research Unit, King’s College London.

http://www.kcl.ac.uk/content/1/c6/05/16/29/SeriousCaseReviews.pdf