Agenda item

To receive the Leicester City Safeguarding Adults Board Annual Report Executive Summary for 2016.

Jane Geraghty – Chair of Leicester Safeguarding Adults Board will be present at the meeting to present the report.

The Board received the Leicester City Safeguarding Adults Board Annual Report and Executive Summary for 2016.  Jane Geraghty, Chair of Leicester Safeguarding Adults Board presented the report and answered Members’ questions.

In presenting the report, the following comments were noted:-

a)         The was the first report since the Adult Leicester Safeguarding Board became a statutory body following the implementation of the Care Act and the Board was compliant with the statutory requirements Care Act requirements.

b)         The Safeguarding Board was responsible for holding all partners to account for their responsibilities and to ensure that each worked with all partners in order that vulnerable adults were safeguarded.  Over 350 cases had been considered as part of the Board’s work.

c)         The Safeguarding Board was working well having committed partners and clear priorities and partners were now engaging in the Board’s work and leading sub-groups.  This was considered as a sign that significant progress had be made in partnership working.

d)         It was of concern that cases coming into the system didn’t reflect the ethnic population of the city and the Safeguarding Board had asked the Stakeholder Engagement Forum (Chaired by Healthwatch) to lead the work on this in order to understand the underlying reasons.  Initial thoughts considered it might be that the people were not aware of the processes in place to protect vulnerable people or know how to access them.  It could also be that people were being kept safe within their own homes.

e)         86 individuals had come back into the system on more than one occasion and there was currently an audit underway to investigate the reasons for this. It was important to know if this was the result of an inappropriate response being given the first time or whether there were other reasons. 

f)          The Safeguarding Board had asked to be part of a pilot for a peer review in May 2017 to assess whether the Board was providing good governance and to assess the impact of work being undertaken and whether the Board was able to demonstrate that its work was improving the safety of people within the system.

The Strategic Director of Adult Social Services commented that the service was not achieving its obligations on safeguarding as there were currently 548 people who were waiting to be screened or assessed and that this level of outstanding screening and assessments had been experienced for some time.   The Cheshire West judgement had confirmed that this was not a new burden for adult social care services and that there were no extra resources to meet the increased demand.   The service had changed the risk assessment process behind DoLS (Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards) and the biggest group affected by the changes were those coming forward from acute and hostels settings.  Currently they were the least likely to be assessed at the present time.   A government review was underway and some provisional arrangements and suggestions for a new approach to DoLS had emerged, but these would not have addressed the large increase in the 13 fold increase in number of cases that had come forward in recent times.  The number of outstanding screenings and assessments were of concern, but it was a position that was not uncommon across country as a whole.

The Chair of the Safeguarding Board felt that the issue of repeat referrals was of concern and there was a national issue in determining the impact of initiatives and activity, particularly in relation to preventative measures, to help to determine where best to put limited resources.

AGREED:-

That that The Annual Report be received and that Members of the Board continue to improve the contributions to the safeguarding of adults through their own areas of responsibility and through the joint work with the Safeguarding Board.