UNIT 7- PRINCIPLES OF SAFE PARCTICE IN HEALTH AND SOCIAL CARE

(AP1) Explain the implications of a duty of care in a selected health and social care setting. Duty of Care is the legal obligation that you have when in the position to look after vulnerable individuals to protect them from harm and support them to lead a fulfilled life working to high standards and all legislations and policies. In the workplace, there are policies and procedures, agreed standards, codes of practice and other legislation a care worker should follow. In a care worker’s job role, you would be responsible for making sure the service users’ needs are met to the best of your ability as well as making sure the service user does not come to any harm and also making sure they are involved in their care plan. This include promoting service users’ choice and rights to the best of your ability. You would be responsible for assessing risks. You must remain professional throughout your role making sure you are adhering to confidentiality, keeping up to date and accurate records of the care you have or are providing to service users. Duty of care contributes to the safeguarding or protection of individuals by keeping individuals safe whether it is illness, abuse, harm or injury. This can be achieved by involving families, health care professionals and other external agencies into the individuals care plan. Duty of care is a legal requirement and there are policies, procedures, code of conduct and legislation around safeguarding and protecting your service users. Following this guidelines is showing that a setting is providing the best care possible. If you are doing activities with service user, you should always do risk assessments making sure that the service user is aware of any risks also. In childminding settings, the childminder is the key person. The key person should meet the needs of each child in their care and respond sensitively to their feelings, ideas and behaviour, talking to parents to make sure that the child is being cared for appropriately for each family. Duty of care is needed not only to the children, but also to their parents and families, who expect us to use our knowledge to care for their children. A high duty of care is needed for children because of their narrow ability to care for themselves as they are still learning, and the younger the child the higher the duty of care is. The consideration should be even greater if a child is known to have learning difficulties or is known to have a medical condition which may make them more vulnerable than the average child to foreseeable risk of harm. If duties and responsibilities are not being met, the childminders are fully responsible and be held accountable for following negligence to occur. The EYFS (Early Years Foundation Stage) is the statutory framework that ensures all parents and carers that their children will be kept safe and will help them to succeed. This also helps to achieve the five stages of every child matters. Since 2008, it is a legal requirement to use the EYFS to meet the learning and development of all children in all early years setting which complies with the welfare regulations. In addition to that, to ensure the safety and wellbeing of children and young people, childminders are expected to report assessments, receive advice and support from the appropriate people. (Here is an example on how a duty of care is performed in a childminding setting. The given setting is based on where I had my work experience for 17 weeks.) Maria’s Childcare Services Within our setting, we: 1. Carry out daily checks to ensure that the environment inside and outside is safe before the morning session at 8am. 2. Have a checklist of things to do (i.e. check all fire doors are unlocked, all gates outside are locked, no wet floors and all plugs have safety covers etc) and tick them off when they’re done. 3. Have daily rotas for change of nappies, dinners and lunches and vacuuming. 4. Contribute to ensure it is clean at the end of session and at the end of the day and before and after meals we disinfect tables chairs to stop the spread of infection. 5. Ensure that at least one member of staff in each room has been trained in first aid and that we have the right equipment. 6. To complete accident forms when an accident occurs and getting the parent/carer to sign to say there have been made aware. 7. Sign in and out every child that enters and leave the setting, we also have one at the main doors for staff and people that come to drop or collect children. How does the duty of care contribute to the safeguarding or protection of individuals? One part of my work is to always put the children and young people first, keep them safe and protect them from significant harm. We must follow the guidance of every child matters and promote safeguarding and the welfare of the children and young people. We should also ensure that the person caring for a child especially alone is suitable to do so and has a DBS check. Many things help us to provide the care to keep children and young people protected and safe, some of them are as follows: Risk Assessments - By doing risk assessments for all of the activities we do and for the playing areas ensures that if any risks concerning equipment, venues and activities will be found therefore reducing the risk of injury or harm to the children and young people. Also, spotting potential hazards and eliminating them. This includes germs and transferable diseases, we can minimise this just by cleaning surface and toys with an anti-bacterial to promote good health. Policies and Procedures - By having policies and procedures in the setting, it gives a good guidance of what is suitable in the setting from an adult or child that is at an age of understanding the rules and boundaries. Making observations and assessing children: By doing this, I am able to check to see if individual child or young person is progressing and developing at suitable rates. Also by doing observations, it will help us pick up on and recognise any signs of neglect or abuse so that these can be reported to the relevant third parties to protect the child or young person. Training and Development: I and all other childcare providers must keep up to date on compulsory training such as first aid and safeguarding. No one should be left to care for a child or young person alone if they do not have the appropriate training to care for a child. Resource Links: hp Maria Sophia Aludo Inton L3 Health and Social Care YR 2 UNIT 7 - Principles of Safe Practice in Health and Social Care Bryan Smikle (AP2) Discuss ways in which complaints and appeals procedures address failure in a duty of care in a selected health and social care setting. The Care Quality Commission monitors, inspects, and regulates hospitals, care homes, GP surgeries, dental practices, organisations and other care services related to health and social care to ensure they meet fundamental standards of quality and safety and publishes what it finds, including performance ratings to help people choose care. All organisations inspected and regulated by the CQC must have a complaints procedure and staff should be familiar with that procedure so they can assist people who wish to make a complaint. The care provider must investigate the complaint thoroughly and take action if problems are identified. Complaints may be made because of something done, an act committed, or they may be because of something that should have been done and was omitted. Some reasons for complaints against both NHS and Social Services may be: (1) Attitudes or behaviour of individual care workers, for example, rudeness, abuse or persistent lateness (2) Discrimination for example by not providing information in alternative formats for those with visual impairments (3) Poor delivery of services, such as not providing menu choices for vegetarians. Some complaints may relate to social care, for example: (1) the local authority refusing to assess a person’s need for adult social care, (2) unreasonable delays in assessing needs or providing services to meet assessed needs, (3) how the cost of a service is worked out if an individual has to pay. In the NHS, complaints should first be sent to the service provider. Many issues can be resolved locally and do not become full complaints. If the situation is not resolved then the complaints procedure is as follows: Stage One - Make a formal complaint to the service provider, for example, a GP, dentist, hospital or the organisation that commissioned their services, such as the local Clinical Commissioning Group or NHS England which purchases primary care services. CCGs oversee the commissioning of secondary carem such as hospital care and some community services. Stage Two - If you are not happy with the outcome of the complaint, you can refer the matter to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman, who is independent of the NHS and government. Complaints relating to social care should be made to the local authority providing the care but if a person privately arranges and pays for their own care, or uses a direct payment from the local authority to pay for the care that they themselves arrange, they must complain to the organisation that is providing the care who will have their own complaints procedure. If the problem is not sorted, the Local Government Ombudsman makes final decisions on complaints that have not been resolved by the NHS in England and UK government departments and other UK public organisations. On the other hand, here is a summed up options for complaints procedure: 1. Speak to the person providing the care, or their manager 2. Use the local authority complaints procedure or the complaints procedure of the care provider if this isn’t the local authority 3. Report your complaint to the Local Government Ombudsman 4. Take legal action, for example, for personal injury, negligence, discrimination or for breach of your human rights 5. Report concerns to a regulatory body 6. Report concerns to other bodies such as the Care Quality Commission or your local Healthwatch 7. Talk to your local councilor about your concerns All organisations should treat complaints seriously and with respect. Healthwatch, the consumer champion for health and social care say that people should have the right to have complaints and feedback taken seriously and acted upon when things go wrong. Maria Sophia Aludo Inton L3 Health and Social Care YR 2 UNIT 7 - Principles of Safe Practice in Health and Social Care Bryan Smikle (AP3) Describe the types and signs of abuse and neglect that may be experienced by different individuals. There are different types and signs of abuse and neglect. This can be experienced by anyone regardless of one’s age, gender, race and ethnic background. In this section, I will be describing the types and signs of abuse a child can experience. I am using children as my example as I have had my work experience in a childcare setting. The term ‘safeguarding’ means the process of protecting children from abuse or neglect, preventing impairment of their health and development, and ensuring they are growing up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and ef ective care that enables children to have optimum life chances and enter adulthood successfully. Abuse and neglect are forms of maltreatment of a child. Somebody may abuse or neglect a child either directly by inflicting harm, or indirectly, by failing to act to prevent harm. Children may be abused in a family or in an institutional or community setting; by those known to them; or, more rarely, by a stranger. They may be abused by an adult or adults, or another child or children. There are four types of child abuse. They are defined in the UK government guidance ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children’ 2010. Although bullying is not defined as abuse within Safeguarding 2010, there is enough evidence that is it abusive and can consist in at least one, if not all of the types of abuse. Emotional abuse includes actions or behaviour that have a harmful effect on the emotional health and development of a person at risk. Emotional abuse is the persistent emotional maltreatment of a child that causes persistent adverse effects on their emotional development. This is also termed as psychological abuse which combines emotional abuse and emotional neglect (Glaser, 2011). There can be two elements involved in emotional abuse, active and passive. Active abuse is a premeditated act, an individual scares, demeans or verbally abuses another. This includes terrorising, rejecting, exploiting or corrupting. Passive emotional abuse consists of depriving a child of the love or care needed to lead a happy healthy life. This can be as a result of the lack of knowledge, understanding or care that a parent or carer has about the child’s needs. It may involve seeing or hearing the ill-treatment of another. Emotional abuse can also involve serious bullying, including cyberbullying, causing children frequently to feel frightened or in danger. This abuse can be difficult to measure, as there are often no physical signs. There may be a developmental delay due to a failure to thrive and grow, although this will usually only be evident if the child puts on weight in other circumstances, for example when hospitalised or away from their parents’ care. However, children who appear well-cared for may nevertheless be emotionally abused. Some signs that maybe visible are: neurotic behaviour, for an instance, sulking, hair twisting, rocking, being unable to play, fear of making mistakes, sudden speech disorders, self-harm, fear of parent