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ABSTRACT
Health visitors lead the Healthy Child Programme (HCP), a universal public health service designed to give children the best start in life. Running through the HCP are responsibilities to safeguard and protect children. Supporting the role of the health visitor is essential to ensure quality interventions and improved outcomes for children.
This article describes an empirical study. It explores the experiences and views of health visitors on the mechanisms of support they use for working in child protection and safeguarding. A qualitative approach was used to collect data from two focus groups. The data produced was transcribed and a thematic analysis used to produce the results.
The results demonstrate that health visitors gain the majority of their support from their colleagues and from supervision processes. Also identified from the data analysis were three factors which health visitors felt supported their role. These were support for managing the emotions associated with child protection work, feeling safe and effective in practice and having time to reflect and evaluate casework,
KEYWORDS
Safeguarding, Child protection, Support, Health visitor
INTRODUCTION
Safeguarding and child protection practice has been acknowledged as having a fundamental role in the health visiting service (DH, 2011). Being a universal service, health visiting is ideally placed to identify vulnerable children and those at risk of abuse (DCFS, 2008). Recent socio-political influences affecting health visiting (DH, 2011 ) as well as recommendations from reports such as Laming (2009) have suggested health visitors require good support to fulfil their role. Further recommendations (Munro, 2011) advocate that safeguarding practice should be based on sound professional judgements and partnership working with families. The Munro Report (2011) particularly criticised the procedural and task orientated systems entering child welfare services. If health visitors are to use their professional judgement and remain responsive and attuned to the needs of children then support is essential. It is also important to gain knowledge and understanding on this support and how it occurs in practice.
Health visiting has been acknowledged as a profession which is exposed to high levels of stress and anxiety (Wallbank and Hatton, 2011). Anxiety has been acknowledged to run throughout the safeguarding role (Morrison 2006). If health visitors are not supported, especially with the emotional aspects of their work, they can...