Striving to Create a Safer Culture - Empowering Staff is key

A blog post by Elyzabeth Hawkes, Designated Safeguarding Lead and Deputy Chief Executive  

An organisations culture is the essential ingredient to support and foster real and meaningful safeguarding practice in action.  

The key aspect is to create an environment where people feel safe to speak up and to understand how they can do this.  

Safeguarding is much more than organisational policies, procedures, and training. The achievement of the safeguarding principles of Empowerment, Prevention, Proportionality, Protection, Partnership, and Accountability rests on your organisational values, behaviours and openness that need to be embedded in your organisation.  

Over the last 4 years POhWER have strived to develop a culture to be the best it can be in empowering our staff to feel confident to speak up - not only for our clients but for themselves and their colleagues. They need to know they can raise concerns, and challenge unsafe practices without fear of reprisal or being labelled as a troublemaker. 

A positive safeguarding culture means having the passion, willingness, and bravery to open your eyes and ears - both internally and externally - to what is really happening and understand how and what support is there to support appropriate disclosure. 

The key ingredient for us is our staff and our commitment to creating the trust and channels that allow people to raise concerns safely. This includes staff, partners, providers, customers, and the public. Everyone has an individual safeguarding duty, but they can only fulfil it if they feel heard and supported. 

We have been supported in this work by engaging in external audits over the last 4 years to ensure we have an objective oversight and assessment of our safeguarding framework to support continuous improvement through policy audit, anonymous surveys and interviews and audit action plans to support our improvement.  

The recommended developments over the last 4 years have seen the creation of a dedicated team for Safeguarding to support our staff, robust recruitment process and a range of safeguarding training and the development of a Safeguarding forum to engage in safeguarding  best practice and safeguarding insights , raising awareness and promoting engagement and inclusion with all staff.   

Our last audit in July 2024 found that “there is a clear culture of care and compassion within POhWER with visibility of the topic throughout all levels of the organisation from frontline staff into the executive and board” “Throughout conversations, colleagues fully understood their roles and responsibilities in respect of safeguarding. They were confident in who is responsible and accountable, how to recognise, report and record a safeguarding concern.” 

To create and to strive to maintain this culture that actively listens and seeks feedback to promote a safer culture and needs integrity, openness, and commitment from all staff. This is how organisations safeguard - not just to meet regulatory duties, but to uphold the basic human right to live a life free form harm and abuse.