Issue - meetings

19.1.    The Board considered a report on the Safeguarding Adults Board (SAB) Annual Report as required in the Care Act.

19.2.    The Board asked for confirmation the necessary IT support would be put in place to enable ESHT staff to have access to the webinar and flow chart resources on the referral process to ensure they had sufficient knowledge of the process of raising a concern to the Local Authority.

19.3.    Lucy Spencer confirmed the issue was raised at the People Scrutiny Committee and the SAB sent off an update request to ESHT on where they are with the process and is awaiting a response. Mark Stainton confirmed the issue was around all staff having access to the e-learning and the Adult Social Care (ASC) Department had contacted the ESHT IT Team for an update that will be forwarded to the People Scrutiny Committee in due course.

19.4.    The Board RESOLVED to note the report.

14.1     The Director of Adult Social Care and Health introduced the report on behalf of the Independent Chair of the East Sussex SAB, Deborah Stuart-Angus, who would usually present the report but had had to send apologies to this meeting. The Director highlighted that the report covered the work of the partnership board in the 2021/22 year, and the work and focus of the Partnership during this time had continued to be heavily impacted by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The Director’s introduction covered key highlights from the report under the SAB’s five strategic themes; and noted that a number of areas covered in the report, such as the safeguarding issues presented by domestic abuse and modern slavery, linked to the work of the Safer Communities Partnership covered in the previous agenda item, and vice versa. The Director also highlighted the increasing complexity of safeguarding cases that the agencies in the SAB were seeing, with incidents of self-neglect and coercion and control particularly challenging to respond to. The Director concluded by highlighting common areas for learning and assurance arising from Safeguarding Adults Reviews (SAR) that had taken place in 2021/22. The Interim SAB Development Manager was invited to comment and added that the SAB continued to be very active, including in SAR activity, with three SARs underway currently and that area of the SAB’s work increasing.

14.2     The Chair thanked the Director and SAB Development Manager for the report. The Committee asked questions and made comments on the following areas:

·         General Practitioner (GP) safeguarding referrals – a question was asked on whether numbers of safeguarding referrals from GPs had improved, noting that this had been an area of concern for the Committee in previous years. In response, the Director committed to follow up with the figures but understood that safeguarding referrals from Primary Care more broadly, including from roles other than GPs, such as practice nurses, had significantly improved. A lot of work had been done through the SAB and NHS Commissioners to raise awareness of adult safeguarding in health, to bring this in line with the awareness of children’s safeguarding. 

·         Partnership Protocol – a question was asked on how the partnership protocol mentioned in the report was applied in practice. The SAB Development Manager responded that the protocol had been in place since 2016 as the focus of the safeguarding partnerships frequently overlapped. Recently, a piece of work had been undertaken looking at common learning themes from reviews (Domestic Homicide Reviews, Safeguarding Adults Reviews, Drug and Alcohol Related Death Reviews and Local Children Safeguarding Practice Reviews). This had identified a number of areas to focus on and there would now be bi-monthly meetings of review managers, which would include sharing recommendations from reviews underway and ones that had concluded, to ensure action planning was smarter and avoided duplication. The partnerships were also looking at other ways to amalgamate learning to make better use of capacity and resources. Other areas of joint working had included ensuring SARs and Domestic Homicide Reviews  ...  view the full minutes text for item 14