Friday 22 November 2024
Professional and organisational learning

This week is Safeguarding Adults Week. During this week, we'll be sharing daily bulletins with you, related to the Ann Craft Trust themes. 

Today's theme

Today's theme is 'professional and organisational learning'. We all understand the importance of continual learning and development when it comes to making sure our practice is up-to-date. But, how do we ensure that as well as our own practice learning, that our organisations are also learning and improving systems and processes?

Today we want to ask, "how do we ensure that learning from Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs), and other review processes, is embedded and driving organisational improvement?"

What might this mean for you and your organisation?

The Learning and Policy subgroup is one of the five core working subgroups of the West Sussex Safeguarding Adults Board. With membership from across health, social care, the police, the care sector, and the voluntary sector, the role of the subgroup is to establish systems for monitoring, reporting and evaluating adult safeguarding training and learning across organisations.

Central to this, is our role in ensuring that learning from Safeguarding Adult Reviews (SARs) is embedded and driving organisational improvement.

Over the years, we have listened to feedback, particularly around the accessibility of learning for busy, frontline staff, and we have diversified our approach to sharing key learning from SARs. The subgroup takes learning from SAR reports, as well as actions from SAR action plans, and extracts key themes and messages to share with staff across the partnership.

Our usual practice is to develop short briefing papers, which encourage staff to think about their own practice in relation to the theme of the paper, including suggested questions and prompts for reflection. These briefing papers are ideal to support team discussions during team meetings or staff development days. But, we know that written information doesn’t suit all learning styles, so we’ve also developed short podcasts, as well as recorded video presentations, and animated e-learning modules.

So, how do we make sure that these resources reach you, the staff at the centre of safeguarding adults practice?

Our Board has representation from more than 30 organisations across the health, social care, police, and private, voluntary, and independent sector. Every member has the responsibility to share learning within their own organisation, as well as with their wider networks. To support this, the Learning and Policy subgroup, alongside the Board Support Team, produce promotional materials, including newsletters, leaflets, and posters, and maintain the Safeguarding Adults Board website, which hosts a wide variety of learning resources. We share information digitally, as well as running campaigns to get paper-based resources out to venues in the community, such as care providers, GP surgeries, and libraries.

How do we ensure that these resources make an impact?

Of course, as with any training and learning initiative, it’s important for us to ensure that our resources, and the training and learning undertaken by our member agencies, are fit-for-purpose. To support this, we develop short assurance surveys, intended for staff, to seek assurance about training and learning surrounding key themes identified in our SARs. If you ever receive one of these surveys, please do complete it to help us identify any gaps in knowledge, and to plan future resources.

If you’re interested in learning more about the work of the Learning and Policy subgroup, or would like to contribute to the development of our learning resources, including lending your voice to recording a podcast, please do contact safeguardingadultsboard@westsussex.gov.uk.

What are we doing to support your practice?

You can find a wealth of professional development and learning resources on our website. To support your Continual Professional Development (CPD) we have created a CPD Reflective Log (Word, 2.3MB) for your use. Please feel free to use this to track, and reflect on, the professional development that you complete using our resources. 

Our resources are designed to bring key issues to you, to support your learning and keep your practice current and in line with policy and procedure. We constantly review what we are doing to improve what we produce, and this relies on feedback. So, we would very much welcome your comments and views please to safeguardingadultsboard@westsussex.gov.uk.

Key resources: 

• Safeguarding Adult Reviews | West Sussex Safeguarding Adults Board website
• Policies and protocols | West Sussex Safeguarding Adults Board website
• Learning and podcasts | West Sussex Safeguarding Adults Board website

Further reading

Check out these resources for more information about safeguarding adults CPD: Social Care Institute for Excellence (SCIE) Safeguarding adults West Sussex County Council (2024) Learning Pool

Ann Craft Trust

For more information on today's theme, or any of the themes from this week, visit the Ann Craft Trust website.

West Sussex Safeguarding Adults Board
Making Safeguarding Personal

Manage your preferences | Help with your account

Having trouble viewing this email? View it as a Web page.