Nottinghamshire Healthcare has been shortlisted in the Nursing Times Workforce Awards 2018. The Trust is a finalist in the ‘Best workplace for learning and development - Over 1,500 nursing staff’ category for its work to engage clinical leaders in safeguarding children and adults at risk of harm or abuse.
Leadership sits at the heart of effective safeguarding of children and adults, for all statutory agencies. However, senior clinical and safeguarding leaders in the Trust highlighted some of the challenges to leading consistent safeguarding across the workforce. They wanted the corporate safeguarding team to provide opportunities for them to engage in honest discussion, to open up lines of communication, to identify current and future challenges, to share and implement best practice and to have support in the ability to challenge where necessary.
To address this, the safeguarding team developed a project funded by the East Midlands NHS Leadership Academy, with the aim to further develop and maintain effective safeguarding leadership across the Trust, initially through the development and provision of a bespoke safeguarding leadership development programme.
The Safeguarding Leadership Programme was developed and launched with a core delegation of senior leaders, led locally but with national expert speakers, an animated film, workshops and reflections. Delegates were encouraged to commit to demonstrating impact in their service area in respect of safeguarding. Attendees identified service improvement initiatives and began to map out how they might achieve these.
The project has provided an opportunity for a range of services to work together on related themes. Service improvement examples discussed included; a desire to reduce complexity that interferes with outcomes in safeguarding processes; improving the processes and systems surrounding safeguarding allegations against staff; quantifying safeguarding practice and enhancing recognition of the impact of safeguarding activity on services and individuals.
Clare Teeney, Director of HR at the Trust said: “This is fantastic news and very much deserved – this is a great piece of work which will really make a difference. Congratulations and good luck to the team.”
The winners will be announced at an awards ceremony on 4 October.