Safeguarding in Health and Social Care

Safeguarding in Health and Social Care
Task 1.1: Explain why particular individuals and groups may
vulnerable to abuse or/and harm staff and others.
Abuse can be simply defined total neglect such as ignoring physical or medical care
requirements and avoiding access to health, welfare and social needs such as
educational services or preventing one from any necessities of life like drinks,
heating, food, shelter e.t.c. which is legally defined as violating human rights.
In health and social care organisation, it is total mistreatment by any other person or
a group of people which can occur anywhere at any time such workplace, day
centre, hospital, nursing home or residential educational establishment, street or in
supported living house.
Abuse can be in any shape or form just to mention major types of abuse.
Sexual, Financial or materials, Physical e.g hitting, punching, slapping e.t.c
Psychological or emotional neglect and Act of omission, discriminatory, institutional,
self-neglect.
Particular individual and groups could be vulnerable to abuse and harm to self and
others due to some facts such as disability, lack of mental capacity, age or
vulnerability and mainly they depend on or need the help of others to accomplish
their immediate and daily needs or tasks. These categories of people are under
continuous vigilance of service provider to safeguard them from various abuse such
as hitting themselves or others unconsciously. Other groups or individuals could be
abused due to their vulnerability and cannot safeguard themselves and are mostly
abused by their service provider (health carer) by taking such advantage of their lack
of consciousness or vulnerability.
❖ There are four major categories of groups or individuals that are
vulnerable to abuse:
1. Elderly people or the small kids that suffer from any mental or physical
disability (Baldock et al., 2011)
2. Vulnerable groups in this category consist of minority people from a specific
background e.g religions such as Sikhs or people brought to a certain place
by force such as prison because such individuals could be exposed to abuse
by the prison officers.
3. Homeless, drug addict, alcoholics are also vulnerable to abuse as they lose
their sanity whenever they are under the influence of drugs or alcohol they are
totally prone to abuse such as neglect and more popularly sexual abuse.
4. Self-harming or self-injuring individuals are mostly triggered by an abuse
whereby such individual is inflicting pain on his / herself in order to overcome
problem as this pain serves as a relief methods for internal anxiety and agony
they are going through, self-injury can be so extreme sometimes that it can
lead to great health risk, disability and in some serious cases suicide.

A major response to these abuses is mainly to approach the situation calmly
and patiently and deal with the situation around the abuse by giving both
physical and emotional support such as encouraging various creative
activities in order to engage individuals to the desist from such act of self-
harm, addiction etc.
Also, practice regular contacts to give them confident support that help is
always around.
1.2 Review risk factors which may lead to the incidence of abuse
and/or self-harm and other
Various types of risks are linked which causes abuse and self-harm.
This risk factor depends on some certain keys for instance, physically challenged
people will always rely on someone to help them in some certain needs due to the
incapability of achieving such tasks for example personal care, on their own which
may require assistance, sometimes the carer gets annoyed with the demands of
their service users which ultimately leads to grief and abuse. Sometimes not giving
an accurate account to the vulnerable adult or aged people will lead to loss of trust
and young children could also be at the risk factors like problems in parents
relationship, violent nature of the child itself or parents.
The figure below shows factors associated with the risk of incidents of abuse and
self-harm and others.
The figure above demonstrates how various types of risk factors are connected with different
kind of abuses e.g. poverty may cause self-abuse or suicidal tendency while a son may
physically abuse their parents if requested needs were not formally granted.
Risks factors are mainly categorised under social and cultural factors in the above
figure. While social factors are mainly unemployment and poverty because poor
people are not well treated in the society, health factor risk also affect old aged

people and the patient as they are not able to solely cater for themselves, also
people that are socially isolated are open to abuse and they lack required emotional
help, another social factor is housing, if elderly or vulnerable people depend on
younger members of family financially they could face abuse when requesting for
financial need.
Cultural factors such as ethnicity background abuse by consumption of alcohol or
drugs due to ethnicity, status or individual background can deteriorate one’s physical
health and wellbeing. Discrimination on the ground of colour, race, gender, sex and
finally the religion with less number of people are more vulnerable to abuse.
Various risk factor causes different kinds of abuse but the most usual one is physical
abuse.
Isolation is when an individual is totally left alone or being ignored he or she is
vulnerable to emotional abuse.
1.3 Analyse the impact of social and cultural factors on different
types of abuse or harm to herself and others
The various social vice that could lead to abuse is housing, education, health, social
exclusion and disadvantages, support network, poverty while cultural factors could
be ethnicity, religion, discrimination in terms of language, colour and background.
The social factors constitute the longest impact on a person's well-being as
individuals with low social economic stature will always operate on the low esteem
that will lead to inability to access good education standard, good standard of health
in a case of poverty where individual could not be able to afford all the above-stated
life essential commodities and are not able to access any state financial support due
to limitation on their immigration status (such as no recourse to public funds) in the
UK. for instance. In a case of a woman that was supposed to be evicted by Court
bailiff and has nowhere to stay with a young child, this may lead that kind of family to
greater abuse if not for the intervention of the bailiffs, the local council has denied the
family any support on the ground of their immigration status.
Socioeconomic status is highly complex as it contains health quality with education,
income generation and good housing. These create unfair and unnecessary
inequalities which have led most people to long-term health impairments, sickness
and emotional abuse.
The cultural factors as stated constitute discrimination within the racial background,
colour, creed or caste open the vulnerable adults mostly are often neglected due to
these factors by various health workers, this discrimination cause grave havoc by
physical abuse and isolate the adults to sort the issues of health on their own.
This situation is coming among the minority elders in East London as people with
discriminated caste have little access to the major/ fundamental health cares, due to
low life esteem these factors have contributed to their health issues and lead them to

be mentally stressed so also another serious sickness that sometimes takes their
lives or leaves them disabled for the rest of their life.
A rise in blood pressure problems has diversity related to racial discrimination in
adults which further add to severe anxiety and sufferer of all these ailments avoid
themselves from the people community.
Other abuses that could impact the social and cultural factors are sexual abuse as
the individual are open to a form of forced sex, such as rape, incest inappropriate
touch e.t.c due to the low life standard this can happen even in residential care
worker, daycare worker, social care worker or personal assistant and these could
lead to viral sexual disease among adults and can lead to loss of trust by the elders
in the carer.
3.1 Explain Existing working practice is strategies designed to
minimise abuse in health and social care contexts
Various healthcare organisation practice in numerous ways, day in day out in order
to stop or reduce abuse in all sector, but the menace of abuse is rapidly growing
which brings various specific measures to prevent them. Government intervention in
Health care sector promotes greater measures to solve the problems, by the
enactment of legislation, procedure and policy to eradicate abuse and creation of a
healthier society in which everyone has to respect individuals interests and opinion
irrespective of any socio-cultural context.
Some of the legislation and policies implemented by the government in order
to eradicate abuse include:
Whistleblowing
The procedure of Complaint in Care homes
Policy of confidentiality
The policy of Physical intervention
The Care Standards Act of 2002
Every child matters policy 2003
Children's Act of 2004
As a support worker working with vulnerable adults and young adults, we experience
not much of physical abuse except from one out all our residents who are a bit
challenging and violent but other abuses such as emotional abuse, financial abuse,
accidents such as slips and falls cannot be left out in my place of work.
Due to the above stated factors my management tried to implement various strategic
measures to control these various abuses such as in the case of the violent adult
who always hit his head on the wall and causes himself a great self-harm, we always
assign one-to-one service provider for him who monitors him all round in 24-hours
working on 8 hrs shift booking. Whenever he sees staff working around, he hardly
inflicts any harm on himself, we also have a body map chart for recording every mark
and bruises on his body this is kept for safeguarding so that every mark could be