Specialist
Safeguarding Children
Managing Risk and Sharing Information
In The Children Act 1989 the overriding principle is that the child's welfare should be the paramount consideration [The Children Act 1989 section 1(1)
Responsibilities of Agencies and Individuals
Section 27 of The Children Act 1989 authorizes Social Services Departments to request help from other agencies: education, housing, health, other local authorities.
Section 47 of The Children Act 1989 places Social Services Departments under a clear duty to investigate cases where it is suspected that a child is suffering or is likely to suffer significant harm.
Staff from all agencies have a duty to protect children, are accountable for doing so and must be fully committed to giving interagency support to Social Services Departments.
All staff must be alert to the signs of abuse and be ready to pass on concerns to appropriate agencies - i.e. social services and / or the police.
There are several key clinical stages in how we should go about protecting children from harm.
Gathering and Sharing Information
Information sharing is a crucial part of managing risk within child protection.
However there can be some difficulties for staff trying to manage issues of confidentiality to their client and their responsibilities to children.
The welfare of the child(ren) must always be regarded as of first importance. Their age and vulnerability usually render children powerless to protect their own interests.
Whilst clients are entitled to expect that information learned during a health consultation will remain confidential, knowledge or belief of abuse and/or neglect is one of the exceptional circumstances, which will justify making a disclosure to an appropriate person or agency.
Promises of secrecy should never be given. Staff should explain that information gained through a consultation or examination may need to be shared, but only on a "need to know basis".
Decisions have to be made which information is relevant to be shared. This can be done jointly with an experienced colleague or your service advisor.
If a health professional suspects a child is being exploited or abused - the child's interests are paramount. The health professional should try to persuade the child to agree to the sharing of appropriate information. Whether the child agrees or not the relevant information should be disclosed to social services (or the police).
To help staff manage and share information, Haringey Children's Partnership have in place an
information sharing agreement
Once staff have information, it is then crucial that the information is used, understood, analysed and fed into the key stages cycle.
Only then can all the protecting factors and negating factors can be viewed together to enable a judgement about level of risk, level of likelihood and degree of outcome to be estimated.
