Creating Safer Organisational Cultures

This Safeguarding Adults Week we want to raise awareness of the importance of safeguarding, how intrinsic it is at Brook and how well-equipped all our staff are to respond to contemporary and emerging safeguarding challenges. Here, Kelly Harris, Brook Cymru’s Business Development and Participation Lead, talks about how Brook has adapted its participation practices to involve adults.

In the two years since the launch of Brook’s Participation Team we have implemented many positive changes as an organisation to provide meaningful opportunities for our service users to become involved in shaping Brook systems, tools, and services.

Whilst this participation work has been exciting to develop with lots of new opportunities, it has called for a different approach in engaging service users compared to our core education and clinical work. One of the new approaches has been the need to explore extra safeguarding considerations to ensure that we continue to be a safe organisation for service users to engage with through our participation work.

Brook now has three National Participation Forums which have over 50 members across the different age-based Forums – 16-19, 20-25, and 25+.

As an organisation we are well versed in safeguarding young people under 25.

Our decision to create a National Participation Forum for those aged 25+, meant we needed to give extra consideration as to how we effectively safeguard adults and their participation.

Forum Members were recruited through a robust application process. This included submitting an application of interest, an informal ‘interview’ with the Participation Team and, if found to be suitable, they had to provide two references. We also decided to make it mandatory for all Members to have a DBS, which Brook paid for, to ensure the safety of all Forum Members. This was a lengthy process due to the necessary paperwork, but it has been an important part of our safeguarding approach- one which we would encourage other organisations to consider as it has reinforced our commitment to keeping young people, adults, and Brook staff, safe.

It is important to us that the adults on our 25+ Forum feel safe, respected and supported when engaging with Brook.

With this in mind, we create a safe space at all our digital meetings by co-writing a group agreement and making sure Members understand how we could support them and other support services available if they need it. We also decided to create an emergency contact form for the adults, as well as the young people, so if anything were to happen to someone during a digital meeting e.g. fainting, we would be able to notify someone who could go and check on them.

During the last two years, our safeguarding processes have enabled us to involve adults from our 25+ National Forum in shaping and reviewing many areas of Brook’s work. This includes education resources, digital tools, supporting Brook’s Safeguarding Team in reviewing the new Spotting the Signs Toolkit for professionals, as well as helping to improve professionals’ responses to safeguarding.

Establishing the right processes has been vital to ensure that Brook is a safe organisation that finds meaningful ways to involve adults in our work, creating a positive and engaging culture in the process.

However, we also know that it’s important to remain flexible –  making changes if and where necessary to our processes in response to the ever-evolving landscape of participation and the needs of those engaging with our organisation.