This new and very helpful text book is written by five highly experienced adult safeguarding practitioners and academics.
In our safeguarding work, health and social care practice depends on the taking up of appropriately held personal, professional and institutional authority, informed and sustained by compassionate professional curiosity. Safeguarding Adults Reviews often comment on apparent deficits in professional curiosity. Yet, there is a scarcity of definitions and descriptions in the professional literature, and little information and guidance for practitioners. This text book amply fills that gap, providing a very important resource to the safeguarding adults community.
The book has several potential audiences including students, and newly qualified and experienced practitioners in adult social work and social care, as well as in nursing and allied health professions. More broadly it will also be a helpful resource for those working in the criminal justice system, including police and probation. A key chapter in the book addresses the legal and policy context of partnership work in safeguarding adults, widening its usefulness even further, for example to agencies represented on Safeguarding Adults Boards.
The book has a foreword by Dr Adi Cooper OBE, followed by an introduction, six substantive chapters and a final seventh summary conclusion chapter. Written in plain English, the seven chapters have interactive content with opportunities for readers to reflect and apply learning in their own environments. Each chapter begins with chapter objectives and ends with a summary of key points. Chapter content is illustrated with case studies, including from published Safeguarding Adults Reviews and Domestic Homicide Reviews (now known as Domestic Abuse Related Death Reviews). Although the book’s focus is on safeguarding adults, relevant learning from Children Safeguarding Practice Reviews is also woven in. In each chapter there are summaries of recent relevant research, as they apply to the chapter topic, as well as suggested further reading. The book is well indexed and contains a very up-to-date and extensive list of the references quoted in each of the chapters.
The book helpfully addresses some broader changes in practice that have happened and continue to develop since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. These include the more extensive use of virtual meetings and the opportunities and challenges some of these changes present when we are engaged in safeguarding work.
Drawing on the work of Thacker et al. (2019) and Phillips et al. (2024), Chapter 2: Barriers to professional curiosity in safeguarding adults explores emotional, relational, structural and socio-systemic barriers in usefully detail. Personally, I would have welcomed some additional systems psychodynamics analysis such as that undertaken by Shoesmith (2016) in her account of the Learning from Baby P: The politics of blame, fear and denial. A systems psychodynamic perspective can help us to understand why to a greater or lesser extent we all are so easily and inevitably affected by wilful blindness, a concept developed by Heffernan (2011).
That said, Chapter 3: Enablers of professional curiosity in safeguarding adults practice provides a range of very useful evidence-based pointers to enable practitioners and their managers to take care personally and organisationally to support personal and institutional professional curiosity.
Chapter 5: The legal and policy context of partnership work in safeguarding adults is a very dense detail-packed chapter. It seemed to this reviewer that, subject to due attention to copyright issues, it could be used as an induction briefing for new Safeguarding Adults Board members who are less familiar with the context in which SABs work.
This book is an excellent resource to have on your personal or institutional bookshelves. It will make a difference to how you develop and support your professional curiosity in your safeguarding work, filling an important gap in the current literature. At £19.99 in paperback, and a little less as an e-book format, you will get a lot of learning for your money.
