Could curiosity save lives? An exploration into the value of employing professional curiosity and partnership work in safeguarding adults under the Care Act 2014

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to consider the importance of professional curiosity and partnership work in safeguarding adults from serious harm, abuse and neglect. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws on a range of materials including: review of published materials in relation to professional curiosity, reports from adult serious case reviews (SCRs) and safeguarding adult reviews (SARs); relevant materials drawn from the SAR Library, thematic reviews of SARs and Google searches; observations from practice and experience. It also refers to the relevant academic literature. Findings Lessons from SCRs and SARs show that a lack of professional curiosity and poor coordination of support can lead to poor assessments and intervention measures that can fail to support those at risk of harm and abuse. There are a number of barriers to professionals practicing with curiosity. Working in partnership enhances the likelihood that professional curiosity will flourish. Practical implications There are clear implications for improving practice by increasing professional curiosity amongst professionals. The authors argue that there is a scope to improve professional curiosity by utilising and developing existing partnerships, and ultimately to help reduce the number of deaths and incidents of serious harm. Originality/value The paper considers the importance of employing professional curiosity and partnership work in safeguarding adults’ practice, so enabling practitioners to better safeguard adults at risk of abuse and neglect.

Safeguarding adults practice and remote working in the COVID-19 era: challenges and opportunities

“…For practitioners, a number of concerns have also been identified with remote working practice and these include sense-making, the impact of co-location, the shift to virtual forms of collaboration, reduced communication between colleagues, isolation, performance management, supervision, organisational control, a lack of management oversight and transfer of knowledge among colleagues (Errichiello and Pianese 2016; Jeyasingham 2020). Thacker et al (2020) also identified that remote work can inhibit curiosity in safeguarding adults practice and Jeyasingham (2020) has argued that agile working can lead to the complexities involved in building trusting relationships, being ignored, which is a key ingredient required for effective safeguarding practice (Anka et al , 2017).…”

Safeguarding adults reviews and homelessness: making the connections

“…A term used in child protection (Burton and Revell, 2017), a recent analysis of its relevance to SARs and SCRs suggested that professional curiosity involves "engagement in exploratory behaviour to learn" (Thacker et al, 2019, p. 254). Thacker et al (2019) argued that normalisation of risk, which we found some evidence of in these SARs, is one of an array of factors that can inhibit such curiosity.…”

Exploring the changes and challenges of COVID-19 in adult safeguarding practice: qualitative findings from a mixed-methods project

“…As such, professional curiosity is not simply about individual practitioners asking questions but is also about reliance on other skillsets such as gleaning information from other sources, legal literacy and effective partnership working, for example. Notwithstanding its importance, it is often reported as an area for improvement in national analyses of Safeguarding Adults Reviews (Preston-Shoot et al , 2020), and hindered by a variety of factors such as case dynamics, professional and organisational issues (Thacker et al , 2019).…”

“…As we move to a situation where COVID-19 j THE JOURNAL OF ADULT PROTECTION j becomes endemic, and with the protection of vaccines, it is important to ensure that the risk of COVID-19 is placed in context, taking into consideration the equally weighty risk that abuse or neglect brings with it and the way in which risks from COVID-19or any infectious diseasecan be mitigated, while also responding most effectively to concerns about abuse and neglect. It is also important to consider the extent to which adult safeguarding as a specific area of practiceone that may have particularly grave consequences where there is a lack of professional curiosity (Thacker et al, 2019) can be done effectively in a virtual way. Frontline practitioners often felt that while such a shift to remote ways of working may well have been necessary from a public health perspective, this shift challenged many of their core values, as well as posing a fundamentaland often insurmountablechallenge to markers of good adult safeguarding such as professional curiosity.…”