Safeguarding is the action taken to promote the welfare of adults and children and protect them from abuse, risk and harm. It's also about educating those around them to recognise the signs and dangers.

St Helena has a zero-tolerance approach to abuse, neglect or discrimination of any person.

Safeguarding is everyone’s responsibility

St Helena believes that living a life that is free from harm and abuse is a fundamental right of every person. We have a statutory duty to promote the welfare of our service users and to protect vulnerable families from abuse, neglect, exploitation, radicalisation and risk of harm.

St Helena recognises safeguarding as a high priority. To achieve this, we ensure robust arrangements are in place to provide strong leadership, vision and direction for safeguarding, providing clear accessible policies and procedures in line with relevant legislation, statutory guidance, and best practice. We have clear lines of accountability for safeguarding our service users, such as clinical governance, monitoring, auditing and sharing learning and development from incidents.

To ensure our workforce is competent and our practice is current all our clinical and non-clinical staff, volunteers and trustees are trained at the appropriate level to their role and responsibility in line with the Healthcare Intercollegiate models.

We are regulated and held accountable to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) and under the Integrated Care System Inspection Framework, which comes into effect from 2023.