Safeguarding Adults under the Care Act 2014 – Understanding Good Practice

Pages155-156
Published date28 March 2019
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/JAP-02-2019-051
Date28 March 2019
AuthorPete Morgan
Subject MatterHealth & social care,Vulnerable groups,Adult protection,Safeguarding,Sociology,Sociology of the family,Abuse
Edited by A. Cooper and E. White
Jessica Kingsley Publications
2017
Review DOI
10.1108/JAP-02-2019-051
The placing of safeguarding adults onto a
statutory basis via the Care Act 2014 (the Act)
was something that had been long
campaigned for by a number of professions,
agencies, organisations and individuals
representing service users, their carers,
practitioner and academics across the
statutory, voluntary and independent sectors.
Since the publication of No secretsby the
Department of Health in 2000, there have
been numerous publications and research
projects that have examined professional
practice in and, to a lesser extent, the
experience of service users and their carers
of, safeguarding adults. Often, these were
limited by the inconsistency in practice,
structures and systems because of the lack of
a mandatory basis in law to underpin them.
To a degree, the Act and its supporting
statutory guidance have rectified this
situation, and this book is an example of how
a more rigorous approach can now be taken
to provide an evidence base to support and
inform good practice in this area. As is
acknowledged within the book, it is still
comparatively early in the implementation of
the Act for a body of practice and legal
precedents to have been established,
resulting in some of the cases and examples
pre-dating the Act. This is not, in itself, a major
issue, as good professional practice remains
good professional practice, despite changes
in legislation and regulations.
The book covers a broad range of issues and
approaches that are important and relevant to
safeguarding adult practice, and raises some
interesting challenges that need to be
addressed as the Act and initiatives such as
making safeguarding personal are embedded in
practice, organisations and structures. I was a
little unclear as to the target audience the editors
were aiming for: professionals; practitioners;
operational managers; strategic managers;
academics; trainers; students? At PASAUK, we
would include all of the above if safeguarding
adults is part of their remit or job description,
and I would suspect the same is true here.
However, the book includes a level of detail
about parts of the Act what Section 42
includes, for example but ignores others,
such as Sections 67 and 68 and the duty on
local authorities to provide independent
advocacy in certain circumstances where the
individual has mental capacity. Some of the
case studies do not, in my view, come under
the remit of safeguarding under the Act, as
one of them points out. At times, there is a
confusion between the presumption and the
assumption of capacity required by the
Mental Capacity Act 2005 (the MCA), a
confusion that, in my opinion, is often
instrumental in the MCA being ineffectively
implemented. Use is made of the terms old
peopleand older peoplewhich, as
someone in his late 60s, I find difficult if not
offensive, as the terms are meaningless at
best and stereotypical and ageist at worst.
Ifthepersonalisnowpoliticaland
safeguarding should be personal, it follows
that safeguarding is also political. The book
does not address the political context in
which the Act was drafted and enacted; this
is important as it can be seen as explaining
the lack of clear def initions containe d in the
Act and its supporting statutory
guidance there is no definit ion of either
abuse or neglect, nor of safeguarding and
the lack of prescription with regard to
policies and structures. A government
committed to reduc ing the size of the sta te
provision and to a per iod of austerity in the
public services could hardly do otherwise,
but these have major implications for
implementing the Act and multi-agency
practice in particu lar. Some of the
approaches outlined in the book, while
examples of good practice, would be
comparatively expensive to implement, and
the need for the publ ic sector to make
ongoing savings while budgets are either cut
or remain static makes it difficult to make
person-centred practice and treating the
service user as an equal partner a reality.
Safeguarding Adults
under the Care Act
2014 Understanding
Good Practice
VOL. 21 NO. 2 2019, pp. 155-156, © Emerald Publishing Limited, ISSN 1466-8203
j
THE JOURNAL OF ADULT PROTECTION
j
PAG E 15 5
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