For professionals

Safeguarding children – the action we take to promote the welfare of children and protect them from harm – is everyone’s responsibility.
Everyone who comes into contact with children and families has a role to play. Within the law a child is anyone who has not yet reached their 18th Birthday.

Safeguarding and promoting the welfare of children is defined in Working together 2018
• Protecting children from maltreatment
• Preventing impairment of children’s health or development
• Ensuring that children grow up in circumstances consistent with the provision of safe and effective care
• Taking action to enable all children to have the best outcomes

 

For children who need additional help, every day matters. Academic research is consistent in underlining the damage to children from delaying intervention. The actions taken by professionals to meet the needs of these children as early as possible can be critical to their future.
Professionals must share appropriate information in a timely way and can discuss any concerns about an individual child with their own colleagues with includes the child’s GP, health visitor or school nurse, and local authority children’s social care. There should be no delay in reporting concerns about abuse and neglect.

For further details see Safeguarding Children and Young People.

Contact details:
Islington Children’s Social Care
Phone: 020 7527 7400

The new data regulations did not impact on the fact that where services are working together in the best interest of the child data can be shared. It is always good practice to ensure that parents and where appropriate child/young person understand the intention and have absolute clarity on the purpose of that sharing of information.

We have an information sharing protocol with LBI which allows the sharing of anonymised data to better target resources. (Awaiting final sign off and then will be shared with all staff).

An example might be to use the data on the level of learning of a child (GDL ) at school entry which is collected by LBI and whether the child accessed any developmental reviews prior to school, data held by health.

Do we have to have consent to share and should we have that at every contact?

The advice is always to seek consent and to be transparent in your working with any family or individual. However it is about reasonableness and the Health and Social Care Act will support your decision making if it supports the best interest of the child.
 
The Islington School Health Service offers a confidential service we are committed to maintaining the privacy, dignity and confidentiality of all children and young people at all times.  This means that we do not talk about your visit to anyone outside of the School Health Service without your permission unless the young person is in serious danger. If you have any worries or questions about confidentiality, don't hesitate to ask us.