This section critically examines the policy and guidance issued since January 2022 that is relevant to safeguarding adults. At the time of writing (September 2022) many of those participating in the fieldwork were still familiarising themselves with the new arrangements.
Establishment of ICBs
The Health and Care Act 2022, established on 1 July 2022, saw the establishment of 42 ICSs.
Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) were closed down on 1 July 2022 when ICBs were established on a statutory basis. This means that ICBs for each area are effectively a merger of the pre-existing CCGs in the area covered by the ICB. This is important for safeguarding adults because the Health and Care Act 2022 transfers all legal responsibilities for safeguarding that previously lay with CCGs to the ICBs.
Geography
The table below sets out key dimensions of the 42 new ICBs. The point of specific interest to this review is the variation in the number of councils within each ICB area ranging from one to 18 with an average of five. Given that each council will have a SAB, then corresponds to the number of SABs within each ICB footprint.
Variation in ICBs and its impact
Dimension
|
Average
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Range
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Population
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1.4 million
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Range: 0.9 - 3.1 million
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Funding allocation
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£2.7 billion
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Range: £0.9 - 6.9 billion
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Number of providers
|
6
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Range: 1 – 17
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Number of local authorities
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5
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Range: 1 – 18
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ICB membership
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17 (19 w/ obsv.)
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Range: 11 – 26 (12 – 28)
|
The above table, authored by Edward Jones, Senior Policy Advisor, NHS Confederation ICS Network, captures the variation in ICBs and the impact of this is discussed above under “Findings”.In order to understand the extent to which ICB geography matters to the ongoing working of SABs, a range of SABs working in different geographical topographies were included in the fieldwork.
Governance arrangements and safeguarding
NHS England requires the ICBs to identify named executive board member leads for safeguarding; special educational needs; disabilities (SEND) and for children and young people’s services. These are not new statutory duties and are intended to secure visible board-level leadership of these issues. In most places these duties are held by the ICB chief nurse, who also holds the responsibility for quality and safety.
The model constitution for the new ICBs include the roles of executive and non-executive directors and the establishment of subcommittees chaired by a non-executive director. Many ICBs have a board subcommittee with responsibility for providing assurance on the quality of services commissioned, usually chaired by a non-executive director. The guidance states that “this committee must be separate from the system quality group (SQG) (see below), although the SQG will be chaired by the ICB executive director with responsibility for quality (medical director or director of nursing)”. This separation is necessary because they have different remits, membership, and lines of accountability.
Quality committees are an internal quality assurance mechanism for ICBs to ensure they are effectively discharging their statutory duties.
System Quality Group (SQGs) are for intelligence sharing, engagement and improvement across system partners, including regulators.
Guidance to clinical commissioning groups on preparing integrated care board constitutions
As mentioned in the Findings above, a search on the word “safeguarding” was carried out on a sample of 21 out of 42 (50 per cent) ICB information packs for the recruitment of non-executive directors including person specifications. Only two of the recruitment packs mentioned safeguarding.
Place
“Place” is not defined in the legislation, but in most parts of the country corresponds to the council area, but this is not the case everywhere. Where place is the same as the council there will be a direct mapping of place with the local SAB. However, where this is not the case then it is possible that one place will relate to more than one SAB. An example of this is to be found in South East Essex that covers Essex County Council SAB, Southend SAB and South West Essex place which covers Essex County Council and Thurrock SABs.
NHS statutory responsibility for safeguarding adults sits with the ICB. However, in the same way that SABs have worked with HWBs and safer community partnerships in furtherance of the prevention agenda, it is likely that the new place-based partnerships will be a focal point for SABs for local issues about local systems or services.
The ICB, operating across many place partnerships could be where health care concerns common across more than one SAB within the ICB area can be escalated. Concerns that are wider than health care and that relate to many services/agencies and may be about local systems or organisational abuse can be taken into the local ICPs. In the absence of explicit guidance on escalation, there was an expectation expressed at the final workshop by senior NHS Safeguarding colleagues that ICBs develop with their SABs an escalation protocol.
NHS Safeguarding Accountability and Assurance Framework (SAAF)
Purpose
The most recent edition of the SAAF, covering children, young people and adults was published by NHS England in July 2022. Safeguarding children, young people and adults at risk in the NHS: Safeguarding accountability and assurance framework has been described as the foundational NHS guidance on safeguarding adults.
The SAAF references the changes made in the Health and Care Act 2022 and sets out the expectations of every NHS and NHS funded organisation and of individuals working in healthcare with respect to safeguarding children and adults. It emphasises the fundamental importance of partnership working: “it is vital that local practitioners continue to develop relationships and work closely with colleagues across their local safeguarding system”. The SAAF provides guidance and minimum standards, sitting alongside the development of local safeguarding policies and practice.
The SAAF identifies “how NHS England and national teams work with ICB accountable leadership and ICB place-based leadership to support partnerships”. The SAAF states that the ICB executive chief nurse will be accountable for the statutory commissioning assurance functions of NHS safeguarding in the widest sense, including prevention and strategic planning.
The SAAF contains a section entitled “Parallel investigations”, which draws the connections between other types of investigation and safeguarding.
Parallel investigations: At times, the safeguarding of children and/or adults in a health setting may feature in a wider multi-agency statutory review commissioned for other purposes, for example a DHR or a mental health investigation. In these circumstances a separate safeguarding practice review may be deemed appropriate. NHS organisations should be prepared therefore, to share information and cooperate with the parallel practice review panel. Duplication of effort should be avoided where possible with each review informing the parallel process. System leaders need to be aware of the new patient safety incident response framework which may also be activated due to other incident management processes (SAAF paragraph 4.6).
Roles
All (NHS and NHS funded) providers must identity a named lead for adult safeguarding and a Mental Capacity Act (MCA) lead and one of these roles should include the management of adult safeguarding allegations against staff. This could be a named professional from any relevant professional background.
The role of the named professional is to “promote good professional practice within their own organisation, supporting the local safeguarding system and processes, providing advice and expertise for fellow professionals, and ensuring safeguarding supervision and training is in place”. They should work closely with their organisation’s safeguarding lead, with designated safeguarding leads in the ICBs and SABs. This includes named GPs/named professionals within primary care.
The SAAF sets out the roles of designated professionals who are experts and strategic leaders for safeguarding. They are required to have direct access to the ICB Executive, to ensure that there is the right level of influence of safeguarding on the commissioning process. The ICB accountable office (the chief nurse) should meet regularly with the designated professionals to review ... adult safeguarding in their local area. The fieldwork identified concerns that there may be insufficient numbers and visibility of designated leads in the new systems.
The designated lead professional for adult safeguarding will:
- offer support and advice to the board member responsible for adult safeguarding and ensure the regular provision of training to staff and board of the ICB
- provide a health advisory role to the SAB and must attend, fully brief and support the ICB SAB member
- will take a lead for health in working with the SAB on safeguarding adult reviews
- will take forward any learning for the health economy. (para 4.7.3).
System Leadership
It is the role of NHS England to ensure that the health commissioning system is working effectively to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, young people and adults. NHS England is the policy lead for NHS safeguarding.
The National Safeguarding Steering Group (NSSG) has oversight of the ICBs to ensure that NHS England teams are appropriately engaged in the local place based multi-agency safeguarding partnerships, SABs, community safety partnerships and HWBs to raise concerns about the engagement and leadership of the local NHS.
NHS England has a statutory requirement to oversee assurance of the ICBs in their commissioning role.
Commissioning
NHS England, via national membership networks and regional safeguarding leadership, will support designated professionals and named professionals to have adaptive and collaborative conversations with local authority commissioners to ensure that effective local safeguarding arrangements are in place (paragraph 5.4)
Multiagency safeguarding arrangements
The final section of the SAAF outlines ICB membership of existing partnerships, such as: safeguarding children partnerships, community safety partnerships, SABs and the HWBs. The guidance says that the nature of the relationship between and SABs and HWBs is decided locally.
The SAAF has the following to say about SABs: The SAB should not be subordinate to, nor subsumed within, local structures that might compromise their separate identity and voice. NHS commissioners and providers are responsible for understanding these arrangements and ensuring that they are fully engaged and working effectively to support them (paragraph 6.8.3).
Systems Quality Groups (SQGs)
The SQGs are strategic forums to support both quality and safeguarding. Their purpose and function is described in guidance published by the NHS England's National Quality Board in January 2022: National Guidance on System Quality Groups. Comments about the SQGs are set out in the “Findings” section above.
Purpose and function
As noted above, SQGs are not the ICB’s formal assurance committee for quality and are not statutory bodies. They build on and replace the predecessor CCG Quality Surveillance Groups. There is an intention to update the guidance as the systems bed in.
[SQGs] will provide an important strategic forum within ICSs at which partners from across health, social care and wider can:
- routinely and systematically share and triangulate intelligence, insight and learning on quality matters across the ICS
- identify ICS quality concerns/risks and opportunities for improvement and learning, including addressing inequalities. This includes escalating to the ICB, council assurance (for example, safeguarding assurance boards) and regional NHS England and NHS Improvement teams as appropriate)
- develop ICS responses and actions to enable improvement, mitigate risks (respecting statutory responsibilities) and demonstrate evidence that these plans have had the desired effect. This includes commissioning other agencies, and using ICS resources, to deliver improvement programmes/solutions to the intelligence identified above (eg academic health science networks (AHSNs)/provider collaboratives/clinical networks)
- test new ideas, sharing learning and celebrating best practice (paragraph 1.5).
Safeguarding adult activity will be an important, but not the only, component of intelligence and information sharing that underpins the assurance of care quality. The flow of information should be in both directions, that is from the member agencies to the SQG and from the SQG to the members (for example to SABs). SQGs would be expected to escalate concerns to SABs. The guidance sets out the types of issues that “could reasonably come through an SQG”.
- Place-based quality: for example, triangulating quality performance, safeguarding and safety reporting to identify patterns and trends in the data, gaps, and support improvement, access and patient flow
- Pathways and journeys of care: for example, children’s mental health, urgent and emergency care, frailty, autism and learning disability (eg embedding key system learning from a LeDeR Review)
- Inequalities and variation: including full consideration of how the ICS can reduce inequalities and address wider determinants of health (eg housing, fuel poverty) to improve the quality of care
- Quality within multiple providers and provider chains: for example, provider collaboratives, independent chains) – eg triangulation of learning from deaths information (eg Regulation 28 Prevention of Future Deaths reports, patient safety incidents and investigations, national clinical audit), with learning shared and embedded across the ICS
- Safeguarding concerns: for example, within a learning disability or autism unit
Participants commented that the earlier CCG Quality Surveillance Groups had not fully embraced safeguarding adults’ issues and systems. It was hoped that the SQGs would have a different approach. It was felt that a helpful approach would be to see quality and safeguarding as the opposite ends of a spectrum (as one participant put it “safeguarding is what happens when quality fails”).
Membership
The membership of SQGs is drawn from all parts of the system, including the ICB and councils. The guidance does not refer to the independent chairs of SABs, although participants expected to be involved in the SQGs and one participant reported that their SQG had invited all the independent chairs within their ICS area. Another participant reported that in their ICB, a single place on the SQG had been made available for a SAB chair to attend as a representative of all the SAB chairs.
Accountability for safeguarding
It is important to note that SQGs work at ICS/ICB level (ie at sub regional level), even though the guidance says that they may wish to include ‘place’ quality leads in their membership and to develop equivalent groups at ‘place’ level. However, “risks should only be escalated from place level when an ICS-level solution is required” (paragraph 3.13).
The box below is from the guidance, setting out the areas for SQGs to consider. It should be noted that there is no direct reference to SABs.
SQG Guidance: areas to consider
- How they will ensure effective engagement with local authority representatives (directors of children’s services and directors of adult social care) on the group: for example, a local authority representative may be designated as co-chair.
- How they will ensure that issues, risks, learning and trends from councils (eg emerging safeguarding concerns, annual reports) are brought to the SQG, triangulated with wider intelligence and inform priorities and actions.
- How they will inform council areas of priority and plans.
- How they will partner with local authority partners on areas and concerns of mutual interest. (paragraph 3.)
The guidance goes on to say that the role of the ICB is “to be accountable for the effective oversight and management of healthcare risk (where they do not fall under council assurance, eg safeguarding)” (paragraph 3.12). The guidance might be read to say that the only ICB accountability was for healthcare risk.
Safeguarding and the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF)
The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework was published in August 2022 by NHS England, replacing the Serious Incident Framework. Some participants expressed disappointment that the opportunity had not been taken to include the linkage and overlap between patient safety and safeguarding adults in the new guidance. Indeed, the document does not have a single reference to safeguarding adults. This guidance will not therefore be of assistance to clinicians and other frontline staff in identifying safeguarding adult concerns that should be reported as such and responded to accordingly. It was felt that it may fall to the SQGs to put in place additional policies and procedures to fill this gap.
Links between safeguarding and patient safety are highlighted in the SAAF (described above) and NHS England Safeguarding adults pocket guide. The guidance states that safeguarding is a “fundamental part of patient safety and wellbeing”.
Safeguarding within multiple providers and provider chains
The issue of working with multiple providers, provider collaboratives, independent providers and provider chains, was mentioned by several participants in the fieldwork for this review. For example, participants referred to recent SARs concerning individuals placed in private assessment and treatment units distant from the individuals’ home. There was reference to safeguarding concerns, common across a number of neighbouring SABs, about staffing in organisations that provide services across several SAB areas. The view was expressed in the fieldwork that the lines of escalation to the ICBs and the role of the SQGs was not clear in the guidance on SQGs (discussed above).
The guidance refers to provider collaboratives, which are included in the membership of the SQG. However, there is an absence of detail about provider collaboratives and safeguarding adults. Likewise, there is an absence of reference to the safeguarding responsibilities of provider collaboratives in the guidance produced by NHS England - Working together at scale: guidance on provider collaboratives, August 2021.
It should be noted that provider collaboratives are not statutory entities. However, looking to the future, as the role of provider collaboratives is expected to grow, and the role of competition and commissioning to lessen, guidance on their relationships with not just SQGs but also with SABs should be considered.
These are partnerships that bring together two or more NHS trusts (public providers of NHS services including hospitals and mental health services) to work together at scale to benefit their populations. While providers have worked together for many years, the move to formalise this way of working is part of a fundamental shift in the way the health and care system is organised, moving from an emphasis on organisational autonomy and competition to collaboration and partnership working.
From: Provider collaboratives: explaining their role in system working (Kings Fund, April 2022)
Escalation of issues of common concern in more than one SAB
The issue of escalation of matters arising in SARs that cannot be addressed by an individual SAB led to the development in July 2021 by the National Network of SAB Independent Chairs of a national escalation protocol. This included escalation of matters to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC).
Many participants considered that the merger of the CCGs into ICBs provided an opportunity to escalate concerns that were common across more than one SAB, which related to a single organisation or service that operated across more than one place or across the whole of the ICB footprint. This may apply to provider chains and provider collaboratives that offered services across an ICB area. This was welcomed as a positive development, along with the opportunity for shared learning from SARs between SABs. Fieldwork participants said that they expected that escalation procedures were needed particularly where more than one SAB had concerns about organisational abuse within a single provider that worked across more than one council area.
Organisational abuse
Including neglect and poor care practice within an institution or specific care setting such as a hospital or care home, for example, or in relation to care provided in one’s own home. This may range from one off incidents to on-going ill-treatment. It can be through neglect or poor professional practice as a result of the structure, policies, processes and practices within an organisation (Care and Support Statutory Guidance paragraph 14.17).
Development of the escalation processes, at the time of this fieldwork had not yet been put in place by ICBs, but it was acknowledged that this was still early days.
Relevant guidance on escalation is the “National Guidance on Quality Risk Response and Escalation in ICS”, published by the National Quality Board in June 2022; National Guidance on Quality Risk Response and Escalation in ICS.
This document is for systems leaders as they develop their approach to quality management, managing system-level concerns and risk, managing quality concerns and risks. This guidance “builds on the guidance on SQGs” (considered above). It has little to say about safeguarding adults. The guidance takes an approach that sees quality as separate from safeguarding, which is an activity that happens at place level (page 8).
Fieldwork participants proposed that formal escalation processes and protocols should be put in place in ICBs for SABs to use. The protocol could clarify what action can be expected from the ICB in response to any escalation.
Integrated care strategies and expected ways of working between ICPs and adult social care providers
Purpose
Guidance on the preparation of integrated care strategies was published in July 2022
The guidance states that the preparation of an integrated care strategy, ‘should set the direction of the system across the area of the ICB and integrated care partnership . . . setting out how commissioners in the NHS and local authorities, working with providers and other partners, can deliver more joined-up, preventive, and person-centred care for their whole population, across the course of their life’.
This guidance is about addressing needs at system level, but the integrated care strategy should facilitate, ’subsidiarity in decision making, ensuring that it only addresses priorities that are best managed at system-level, and not replace or supersede the priorities that are best done locally through the joint local health and wellbeing strategies’ and the local HWBs.
The guidance continues to note that “for a few integrated care partnerships, there will be just one joint local health and wellbeing strategy in their area. For most ICPs there will be multiple HWBs in their area”.
This is relevant because content about HWBs could apply to SABs. For example, most ICPs will have multiple SABs in their area. In this context, the point about subsidiarity in decision making should be noted.
The section of the guidance on the content of the integrated care strategies covers ’quality improvement’ referencing to the National Quality Board published guidance, which will include the guidance on SQGs discussed above. There is a single reference to safeguarding adults within the context of prevention, see below (there are other references to safeguarding children).
Preventative action takes many forms including the commissioning of prevention services, the promotion of health and wellbeing, population health management, intermediate care services, measures to prevent harm, suicide, violence and abuse, including through the safeguarding, of adults and children; and adopting a broad-based approach which includes action on social and economic drivers of health and wellbeing (page 23).
The guidance states that 2022 to 2023 will be a transition period. This means that ICPs are expected to publish an initial strategy by December 2022. It is recognised ’that integrated care partnerships are at different levels of maturity and development, and this will be reflected in the breadth and depth of the work that can be done in preparing the strategy and, subsequently, what is included in the initial strategy’. Going forward, ICPs will be required to produce five-year joint plans. Discussion in the workshops stressed the opportunity and importance of SABs inputting into these plans.
Other relevant guidance published at the same time as that on integrated care strategies is guidance on ways of working between ICPs and adult social care providers Expected ways of working between integrated care partnerships and adult social care providers guidance states that ICPs and adult social care providers (statutory and non-statutory) should ’build on the existing place-based partnership arrangement and local foster new working relationships’.
The guidance documents do not mention safeguarding adults or SABs explicitly, which is a missed opportunity to take advantage of the intelligence that SABs accrue about systems. This intelligence would be of value as part of the plans and priorities for ICPs.