Essex Vulnerable Adults Protection board
Who are we
What does the Essex Safeguarding Adults Board do?
The Essex Safeguarding Adults Board is an Inter-agency forum for agreeing how the different services and professional groups should cooperate to safeguard vulnerable adults across Essex and for making sure that arrangements work effectively to identify abuse or inadequate care, help vulnerable people and plan and implement joint preventative strategies.
The board aims to raise awareness and promote the welfare of vulnerable adults by the development of an effective cooperative involving people from a wide range of public and voluntary services and other organisations.
The board, which covers the same geographic area as Essex County Council, comprises members drawn from Commissioners of health and social care services, providers of health and social care services, providers of sheltered and supported housing, regulators of services, the police and other relevant law enforcement agencies (including the Crown Prosecution Service), voluntary and private sector agencies, housing, education, probation, DWP Benefits, agencies, carer support groups, advocacy and advisory services, community safety partnerships.
The current mission of the Essex Safeguarding Adults Board is; "To raise awareness, amongst staff, in all agencies dealing with vulnerable adults to the possibility of abuse of them, to promote and develop an effective protection system for them and where preventive strategies fail to ensure our procedures are robust enough to deal with incidents".
Local authorities are required to ensure that there is an Area Vulnerable Adults Protection board covering their area, which brings together representatives of each of the main agencies and professionals responsible for helping to protect vulnerable adults from abuse and neglect.
The Department of Health and the Home Office have jointly issued guidance as to how professional groups and services should cooperate to safeguard vulnerable adults and ensure that arrangements work effectively to bring about good outcomes for them.
"No Secrets: Guidance on developing and implementing multi-agency policies and procedures to protect vulnerable adults from abuse, 2000" can be found at www.doh.gov.uk
The Roles and Responsibilities of Area Vulnerable Adult Protection boards, as documents in "No Secrets" are:
- To develop and agree local policies and procedures for inter-agency work to protect vulnerable adults
- To audit and evaluate how well local services work together to protect vulnerable adults
- To put in place objectives and performance indicators for adult protection
- To encourage and help develop effective working relationships between different services and professional groups, based upon trust and mutual understanding
- To ensure agreement across agencies about operational definitions and thresholds for intervention
- To improve local ways of working in light of knowledge gained through national and local experience and research, and to make sure lessons are acted upon
- To help improve the quality of vulnerable adult protection work through inter-agency training and development
- To raise awareness within the wider community for the need to safeguard vulnerable adults and explain how the wider community can contribute to these objectives