Suchergebnisse

Purpose
The increased involvement of adults at risk in the safeguarding process has become a prominent issue within English safeguarding policy. However, there is evidence to suggest that actual levels of involvement are still low. The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a PhD study in relation to the benefits of advocacy in supporting this involvement in adult safeguarding for older people.


Design/methodology/approach
Participants in the study included advocates and social workers who had experience of working with older people through the safeguarding process within two North East England local authorities. A critical realist approach through in-depth interviews was taken with all the participants.


Findings
The research findings in relation to the benefits of advocacy in supporting older people going through safeguarding processes are reported. The practical limitations and factors which help and hinder advocacy support within the process are also considered. The theoretical implications for power, empowerment, and advocacy are also explored.


Research limitations/implications
A key limitation of this research is that it did not include older people who had been through safeguarding amongst the participants.


Practical implications
Key implications for practice and policy are discussed.


Originality/value
The paper provides an overview and critique of empowerment in adult safeguarding and the role that advocates play in promoting this key principle.

Purpose
The landscape of adult social care, and in particular of adult safeguarding, has shifted considerably over the last decade. Alongside policy changes in the responses to adult abuse, there have been shifts in professional and public understanding of what falls within the remit of this area of work. This results, arguably, in differing understandings of how adult safeguarding is constructed and understood. Given the increasing emphasis on multi-agency inter-professional collaboration, service user involvement and lay advocacy, it is important to consider and reflect on how both professionals and lay people understand this area of work. The paper aims to discuss these issues.


Design/methodology/approach
This study employed Augusto Boal's model of Forum Theatre to explore how a variety of professional and lay groups understood, related to and engaged with how the Care Act 2014 defines and describes "adult safeguarding".


Findings
Lay participants responded to the scenario in a variety of ways, upholding the construct validity of "adult safeguarding" and the authority of the social worker. Social care and health practitioners sought orderly, professionalised and sometimes ritualistic solutions to the "adult safeguarding" scenario presented, seeking carefully to structure and to manage lay involvement. Inter-professional collaboration was often problematic. The role of lay advocates was regarded ambiguously and ambivalently.


Originality/value
This paper offers a number of practice and research recommendations. Safeguarding practitioners could benefit from more effective and reflexive inter-professional collaboration. Both practitioners and service users could benefit from the more thoughtful deployment of the lay advocates encouraged within the Care Act 2014 and associated guidance.

This article discusses the development of a co-produced research proposal. The authors reflect on the process of this work and some of the challenges that were experienced by a team who had a mix of lived, clinical and academic experience of the research topic. We highlight the need to embed trauma informed principles into co-produced research and the ways in which doing so can support the development of co-produced work. As such, the article focuses on how we established safety, choice, collaboration, trustworthiness and empowerment during the process of developing the proposal. Within this we offer our reflection on some of the challenges we experienced and our learning from undertaking this work.

Social policy is often constructed and implemented by people who have little experience of its impact as a service user, but there has been a growing interest in greater public, patient and service user involvement in social policy as both political activity and academic discipline. Social Policy First Hand is the first comprehensive international social policy text from a participatory perspective and presents a new service user-led social policy that addresses the current challenges in welfare provision. A companion volume to Peter Beresford's bestselling All our welfare, it introduces the voices of different groups of service users, starting from their lived experience. With an impressive list of contributors, this important volume fills a gap in looking at social policy using participatory and inclusive approaches and the use of experiential knowledge in its construction. It will challenge traditional state and market-led approaches to welfare