Adults
Children
What practitioners and leaders can learn from serious case reviews in children’s and adults services
Donna Ohdedar is an ex-local authority Head of Law, now an independent reviewer, consultant and specialist in safeguarding and domestic abuse cases. She is involved in three types of serious case review: Child Safeguarding Practice Reviews, Safeguarding Adults Reviews and Domestic Homicide Reviews.
In this insightful session, aimed at both practitioners and leaders, Donna will share what she has learnt from many years of conducting independent reviews and working with practitioners and senior leaders in children’s and adults’ services.
For any safeguarding system to be able to learn about how well it’s doing, it needs good feedback about the processes and the outcomes of the services provided. However, reviews often adopt a deficit focus, and practitioners are often the focus for blame when a tragedy occurs. Where this leads to more compliance measures and defensiveness, we’re not creating the conditions for workers to do what they do best.
Donna will explore how this can be different and how the review process can adopt a strengths-focused analysis, geared around learning from what went well, encouraging openness and ownership rather than leading to more compliance measures and defensiveness.
The workshop will also touch on how to prepare to be involved in a review, and why it is crucial to have the buy in of practitioners, managers and leaders at every level of a service.
Donna Ohdedar, CEO, Review Consulting