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Listen
"It's everyone's job to make sure I'm alright"
Report of the Child Protection Audit and Review
List of Recommendations
Recommendation 1: All agencies should review their procedures and processes and put in place measures - to ensure that practitioners have access to the right information at the right time, and in particular to ensure that:
- Where children present to medical practitioners with an injury or complaint, practitioners must consider what further information is available from their own or other agencies before they rule out the possibility of continuing risk.
- Where children present to any hospital, there should be in place mechanisms for checking other health records to ensure a pattern of injuries is not being missed.
- Where there have been concerns about possible abuse or neglect, schools, police, health service and social work service files should contain a succinct, readily accessible chronology of events or concerns which can be easily referred to should a further incident or concern arise. This chronology should contain information relating to the child and, where known, information relating to other people in the child's life, for example, any previous deaths of children of a mother's new partner.
- Courts should ensure bail address suitability checks are undertaken in cases where the alleged offence is against children, or in the case of domestic abuse, where children may be at risk.
- Caldicott guardians in Health Boards and Trusts should ensure that health professionals are aware of their responsibilities towards the care and protection of children. In particular they should ensure that where children are at risk of abuse and neglect information is shared promptly with other relevant professionals in line with the General Medical Council and the Scottish Executive guidance on when medical confidentiality can be breached.
Recommendation 2: Through the Child Protection Committees all agencies should improve access to help for children who have been abused or neglected by:
- providing for single-page contact information for telephone directories, public phones and the web, which identifies local contact points in health services, local authorities, police services, SCRA and the voluntary sector;
- providing for services users and referrers, information about how to access help for children about whom they are worried. This should include information about how and when children and young people will be consulted, what will happen after a referral is made and what, and how, feedback to people who refer concerns will be provided
Recommendation 3: The Scottish Executive should, in consultation with service providers, draw up standards of practice that reflect children's rights to be protected and to receive appropriate help. All local authorities, health boards, police services and SCRA should undertake regular audits of practice against these standards and report on them annually to the Scottish Executive and local Child Protection Committees.
Recommendation 4: The Scottish Executive should revise the remit of the Child Protection Committees to include:
- Annual auditing and reporting, to constituent agencies and to the Scottish Executive, on the quality of agency and inter-agency work.
- The provision of information to members of the public, volunteers and other professionals.
- Assisting a wider range of organisations to help prevent abuse and neglect through training for staff and volunteers.
- The development of safe recruitment practices for agencies working with young people.
Recommendation 5: Local authority Chief Executives, in consultation with other services, should review the structure, membership and scope of the Child Protection Committee covering their authority and report to their Council and partner agencies on whether it is best constituted to take on the responsibilities for assuring the quality of agency and inter-agency services and the recommendations about their role contained in this report.
Recommendation 6: The Scottish Executive should consult on how child fatality reviews should be introduced in Scotland. This should include consultation on how they should be conducted, how review teams should be constituted, to whom they would report and what legislative framework is required to ensure their effectiveness.
Recommendation 7: The Scottish Executive should strengthen the current arrangements for the development and dissemination of knowledge about abuse and neglect. In particular it should identify:
- the most effective arrangements for recording and collating examples of effective practice;
- the delivery of staff training across all disciplines or agencies;
- the best means of disseminating research findings and best practice; and
- the links between research and knowledge and staff education and training and how this can be consolidated.
Recommendation 8: The Scottish Executive should initiate a long-term study of the effectiveness of current methods of responding to abuse and neglect. The study should follow children from infancy to adulthood.
Recommendation 9: Children's Services Plans should be developed so that they include clear plans for the implementation of national priorities and demonstrate the application of resources to these outcome targets set out in Building a Better Scotland.
Recommendation 10: Local authorities' plans for integrated children's services, as the overarching plans and drivers for all local children's services, should develop positive childhood initiatives. These should be lead by a children's rights rather than a public service perspective and should promote every child's rights to life, health, decency and development. The Executive should support this with a public campaign.
Recommendation 11: The Scottish Executive should:
- Advise on how agency resources can be pooled and what systems may best be deployed to ensure the most effective joint commissioning of services on behalf of children.
- Commission a study of the costs and benefits of the current child protection system in Scotland and identify costed alternative options for improving outcomes for children.
Recommendation 12: There needs to be a new approach to tackling risks and the needs of the most vulnerable. As a first step this should start with assessment of the needs of all new-born babies born to drug- or alcohol-misusing parents; parents who have a history of neglecting or abusing children and parents where there have been concerns about previous unexplained deaths in infancy. The inter-agency assessment and subsequent action plan in respect of each child should clearly state:
- standards of child care and developmental milestones the child is expected to experience or achieve;
- resources to be provided for the child or to assist the parents in their parenting role; and
- monitoring that will be put into place along with contingency plans should the child's needs fail to be met.
Recommendation 13: In keeping with the philosophy of the Children (Scotland) Act 1995, agencies referring to the Reporter should indicate what action they or their agency has undertaken to achieve change through consent and why compulsory measures of supervision may now be necessary.
Recommendation 14: The Scottish Executive should review the grounds for referral to the children's Hearing's system. Specifically, it should explore the feasibility of grounds being framed to reflect more clearly the needs of the child and to be more closely aligned with definitions of need outlined in the Children (Scotland) Act 1995.
Recommendation 15: In order to meet the shortcomings identified in this report, developing linked computer-based information systems should include a single integrated assessment, planning and review report framework for children in need. For those in need of protection the framework should include reason for concern, needs of the child, plans to meet them and protect them when necessary, and progress since any previous meetings. This core assessment, planning and review framework should be accessible and common to all partner agencies, multi-agency case conferences and the children's hearing. Arrangements should be made for appropriate access to information by agencies in other areas should children or their families move.
Recommendation 16: The Scottish Executive in partnership with the regulatory bodies should consult on the minimum standards of professional knowledge and competence required of practitioners who undertake investigations, assessments and clinical diagnosis when working with children and their families. In particular it should establish the minimum necessary qualifications and experience required of those making decisions that fundamentally affect the future wellbeing of children.
Recommendation 17: The Scottish Executive should:
- Establish a national implementation team to take forward the recommendations in the review, in particular the development of standards and local auditing processes.
- Establish a review process for annual reporting on progress and improvements.
- Implement a further national review of child protection in three years' time to be undertaken by a multi-disciplinary inspection team using this report as a baseline against which progress can be assessed.
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