Job responsibilities
Clinical and professional responsibilities
To provide professional leadership, consultancy, advice, risk assessment and expert child protection practice, to support practitioners on actions to be taken in order to safeguard the child. This will involve the dissemination of the specialist skills and knowledge to others. Have a visible presence within the clinical setting.
Able to interpret information, take appropriate action and lead others to do so. To demonstrate appropriate expert practice and highly specialist advice in the assessment, planning, implementation and evaluation of patient care. Ensure that the needs of the child and family are taken into account as set out in national and local policies.
To identify vulnerable children, young people and families early and provide effective programmes of support and care that protects and promotes their health and wellbeing. Provide a seamless high quality service from referral through to assessment, treatment and review. Evaluate the effectiveness of interventions and make any necessary modifications.
Exercise a high degree of autonomy to make critical decisions and judgements and deliver advanced clinical skills to the case management of children and young people with complex safeguarding needs. Undertake complex person-centred safeguarding assessments in line with evidence-based practice, legislation, policies and procedures. Review and interpret all information available utilising a systematic process of reasoning to make a justifiable assessment and differential safeguarding decision.
To promote and deliver high standards of care at all times, which utilises research-based evidence, and is audited and improved accordingly.
Ensure a person-centred approach to safeguarding is delivered across professional boundaries within the Trust.
Ability to communicate very sensitive and distressing information to parents and families. Ability to assess and advise patients and relatives in crisis situations. To facilitate and support all staff to empower parents and carers to develop positive parenting skills to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, ensuring a patient focused approach is delivered.
Ensure that the patient experience is of the highest quality, inspiring patient and public confidence and that all patients and service users are treated with compassion, dignity and respect. Ensure that safeguarding practice and procedures promote equality and value diversity.
To employ strategies to manage conflict and differences of opinion being sensitive to the ethnically diverse population both patients and staff.
To strengthen the bridge between children and adult safeguarding and support young people in transition to adult services.
To establish and maintain clear lines of communication within the Trust and with other agencies, particularly in relation to information sharing and supporting staff through training when dealing with complex safeguarding cases.
To maintain liaison between hospital and community staff with minimum delay to ensure the sharing of the relevant information and facilitate the transfer of care to the child in the community.
To attend case conferences and strategy meetings as requested and support staff who are required to attend. Ability to provide opinion and challenge as appropriate.
Provide support to staff completing clinical, safeguarding and legal nursing documents to ensure they are completed accurately and legibly and that their relevance is understood and confidentiality maintained in accordance with Trust policies and NMC guidelines. To assist staff in the preparing safeguarding referrals and safeguarding reports.
To provide safeguarding children clinical supervision to staff members within the Trust as requested.
Leadership and management
The post holder will act as an exemplary senior clinical role model to the senior nursing team, leading and supporting growth, development and extended roles for the nursing team to allow collaborative working across the service. Maintain a high clinical presence and visibility within the service areas.
To provide leadership in relation to safeguarding, ensuring a culture which focuses on responsiveness, multi-disciplinary and multi-agency working, and high standards of performance and quality.
To promote and contribute to the development of an integrated approach to the care of children at risk.
Promote, maintain and monitor effective communication with members of the multidisciplinary team and partner agencies. Work in close partnership with Multi-Disciplinary Team to ensure all local, corporate safeguarding targets are met and new guidance implemented appropriately.
To support managers/appraisers to ensure that all staff who work with children have the opportunity to review their safeguarding knowledge and practice as part of their personal development plan.
To contribute to the planning and development of safeguarding children systems and arrangements within the Trust, in collaboration with Trust Named Professionals, the Executive Lead and strategic lead for Safeguarding Children.
To contribute to the development of safeguarding children policies and guidelines within the Trust.
To support compliance and implementation of Trust policies and procedures, relevant legislation, Nursing and Midwifery strategy and Clinical Governance standards are understood and practised by staff. To ensure the appropriate utilisation and development of evidence-based guidelines to improve safeguarding services.
To represent the Trust at Safeguarding Children Partnership sub-group meetings as requested by the Head of Nursing and provide feedback from these meetings to the Safeguarding Team.
Assist the Named Professionals with any internal reviews and contribute to child safeguarding practice reviews as appropriate. Ensure recommendations are implemented in collaboration with the Named Professionals through training and staff development.
To contribute safeguarding expertise and advice to service improvement projects or development programmes.
Contribute to the development and running of services by using evidence and data in relation to current performance and the opportunities for improvement. Ensure that the nursing and wider team work efficiently and effectively to maintain performance through the delivery of key performance targets. Engage with and collect data for service improvement and performance targets.
In conjunction with the Head of Nursing and the Lead Nurse for Safeguarding Children ensure systems are in place for the collection and collation of child protection information and statistics to be presented as a quarterly report to the Trust Vulnerable Person Assurance Committee. Work with others to maintain service database, including data entry, retrieval and analysis and provide activity reports as requested.
Lead specific change or development projects agreed as priorities in the Service Business Plan and in accordance with the Local Safeguarding Children Partnership Board priorities. Develop service specialisms and areas of expertise. Be responsible for specific projects, including those that expand or improve the clinical service and enhance financial efficiency without compromising standards or Trust values.
Line manage nurse specialists within the team.
Deputise for the Head of Nursing / Lead Nurse as required.
Risk Management
To ensure Safeguarding Children is an integral part of the Trust Risk Management Strategy and that key staff are aware of the assessment of risk.
Identify and intervene where circumstances contribute to an unsafe environment for children. To bring instances to the attention of the Head of Nursing for Safeguarding Children.
To ensure that Health and Safety issues are addressed in Child Protection Practice.
Foster a culture of professional accountability and responsibility to patients, ensuring that staff learn from complaints, near misses, critical incidents and all forms of patient feedback. Support processes of risk incident investigation, root cause, trend and feedback analysis.
Research and audit
Support organisational audit and benchmarking activities, implementing change where appropriate. Monitor and analyse through audit, child protection cases against agreed standards of care delivery, in particular quality of documentation, appropriateness of referrals and outcome for the child. Responsible for data collection and developing any action plans.
Work with others to maintain service database, including data entry, retrieval and analysis and provide activity reports as requested.
Support the development and implementation of Research and Development programmes within the service. In consultation with the Named professionals initiate audits/research where there is an identified need to inform/change practice.
Horizon scanning and keeping abreast of national developments in relation to safeguarding children and impact of any changes on local policies and procedures. Translate national guidance to local policy and practice.
Education and professional development
Keep up to date with emerging thinking / findings from other centres/national guidance. To ensure that own knowledge, skills and training are maintained through continuing education and that supervision is undertaken on a regular basis.
To contribute to the delivery of the Safeguarding Training Strategy. Together with other members of the Safeguarding Childrens Team actively participate in the provision of the Trusts in house safeguarding training.
In conjunction with the operational leads for clinical areas in the training aspect of feeding back lessons learned from any safeguarding children review, in a variety of educational forums to all members of the Multi-disciplinary teams across the Trust.
Provide mentorship, coaching, supervision and shadowing opportunities to individuals in order to support their development.
