Summary - SAR
A Safeguarding Adult Review (SAR) is conducted by a Local Authority’s Safeguarding Adult Board (SAB) when an adult in its area dies as a result of suspected abuse or neglect. This is a statutory requirement for SABs under The Care Act 2014 and enables the safeguarding team to identify lessons and recommendations, in order to improve safeguarding practices going forward. The value of Safeguarding Adult Reviews is to maximise the opportunity of collaborative, multi-agency learning, and initiate action to prevent further similar cases from reoccurring in the future.
The review process can often-times rely heavily on administrative, manual tasks such as distributing, chasing and consolidating agency forms, organising meetings, assigning and tracking progress of actions and collating feedback from Independent Author reports to name just some aspects of the manual, resource intensive process.
In addition, the information is more often than not spread out across different emails, word documents, spreadsheets and even various paper documents too. Not only does this weigh heavily on time resources, but information being stored in emails and across paperwork also compromises the security of that sensitive data.
Case Review System
The Case Review system is part of QES’ Holistix Safeguarding Suite enabling local, regional and national safeguarding teams to collect, interpret and gain value from multi-agency information, in order to continuously improve the safeguarding of children and vulnerable adults. This is not just an opportunity to understand where there are problems, but to enforce change and prevent potentially avoidable and often tragic incidents from taking place again.
The system has been built across a wide range of applications to meet the requirements of various case review processes; with national guidance, terminology, forms and statutory timings altered depending on the application i.e. reflecting the SCIE guidance for Safeguarding Adult Reviews. QES are committed to evolving the system to reflect new national guidance, and continuously learning from our ever-growing user group and by attending relevant conferences and webinars.
Key Features
Below is a brief overview of some of the SAR Case Review system's features and functionality:
Multi-agency forms
Initial notification and agency involvement forms completed securely online, recording high quality data in one place
Meeting management
Supports administration of meetings, including recording minutes, document uploads, distribution of invites and more
Lessons learned
Record lessons, themes and recommendations throughout to support learning and inform the improvement of local services
Action planning log
Assign actions, link lessons and recommendations, establish deadline dates and monitor progress through an action log
Chronology feature
Mass chronology upload feature supports partners in inputting timeline of events, and consolidates all entries
Use collaboration to develop a written report with multiple users able to input at any given time
IA report functionality
Reporting dashboards
Real-time statistics on common themes, lessons learnt, agency involvement, demographics and much more
Intuitive system
Easy-to-navigate system with a user-friendly interface, saving all users time through the end-to-end review process
Robust security
Two-factor authentication, multiple user roles with varying permissions and GDPR compliant throughout the web-based system