Recording and sharing child safeguarding information

Recording and sharing child safeguarding information

We have been commissioned by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to explore how child safeguarding information is recorded and shared across healthcare settings. This discovery work will help shape recommendations on the information needed and potential standards to support safer, more accurate and timely sharing of safeguarding data so that children at risk can be identified and protected more effectively.

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Background

Statutory safeguarding of children is underpinned by a legal framework and national guidance that set out the responsibilities of organisations and professionals to protect children from harm. Recent reviews and stakeholder feedback have highlighted the lack of a single, agreed set of information to be shared across health partners. In particular, there is no consistent approach to what should be recorded, coded and shared in clinical systems so that practitioners have the right information at the point of care.

This project covers children from pre-birth through to age 18 and will also examine issues with information sharing during the transition to adult services. While the focus is on England, we are engaging in four-nations discussions to understand related projects and the challenges of information sharing across borders.

Aims and objectives

Aim: To identify and agree the information requirements that health professionals need to record and share to support statutory safeguarding of children, and to set out recommendations for information standards and next steps for development.

Objectives:

  • Undertake discovery and user-centred design activities (research, interviews and consultation).
  • Map current data flows: where safeguarding information is collected now and where it is shared.
  • Identify what information is needed (including ‘red flag’ indicators), where it should be recorded and why.
  • Assess current systems and their capability to capture and share safeguarding information (including local EHRs and shared care records).
  • Identify standards and technical specifications required and estimate the likely costs and timeline for standards development.
  • Produce a Discovery Report with clear recommendations and next steps, aligned where possible with the DfE Multi-Agency Information Sharing (MAIS) Programme.

Scope

  • Settings and services: we are seeking input from a wide range of health providers across NHS and independent care (e.g. GPs, hospitals, urgent and emergency care, maternity, CAMHS, dentistry, pharmacies, opticians, sexual health clinics, and ambulance services).
  • Population covered: children from pre-birth to age 18, with consideration of transitions into adult services and links to adult safeguarding where relevant.
  • Areas covered: primarily England, with engagement across the four nations to understand cross-border issues and related projects.
  • Focus areas: identifying information needed to raise safeguarding concerns, how that information is recorded and shared, and where anonymised data could support policy, audit and research.

 

This project will not cover wider multi-agency information sharing in full. That is being taken forward through the Department for Education’s Multi-Agency Information Sharing (MAIS) Programme, with which we will stay aligned.

Consultation

Our consultation will focus on the following areas:

  • Conducting research and a review of existing standards and published evidence.
  • Holding 1-2-1 interviews with healthcare professionals
  • Running two group discussions for professionals in October and November 2025
  • Gathering examples of current good practice, mapping system capability (including local EHRs, shared care records and tools such as CP‑IS), and identifying clinical safety risks that require immediate attention.
  • Producing a Discovery Report and a set of recommended next steps for standards development, costing and timelines by December 2025.


Questions we are exploring

  • Some of the questions guiding our discovery work include:
  • What child safeguarding information is currently recorded and shared within healthcare?
  • What would count as a ‘red flag’?
  • How are safeguarding concerns recorded and passed between services and to MASH/Local Authorities, and what feedback is received and recorded?
    What information recorded outside health (for example school attendance) would be helpful?
  • Do existing digital systems support capture and sharing of this information?
  • What are the current barriers to effective sharing, including during transition to adult services?
  • How much of this learning applies to adult safeguarding?

 

How to get involved:

If you are a clinician, system supplier, commissioner, local authority professional, or have expertise in children’s safeguarding and would like to contribute to this work, please get in touch with PRSB to participate in interviews or group discussions, share examples of practice, or contribute evidence for the Discovery Report.

Please include your name, role, organisation and any relevant experience or materials you can share. We welcome contributions from across England and from colleagues in the other UK nations to help us understand challenges around cross-border information sharing.

Email: info@theprsb.org


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Better records for better care

CHAT theory also explicitly addresses five areas which if addressed systematically will help overcome stakeholder differences in pursuit of the common goal:

1. Understanding the artefacts that characterise the group and its activity.
• The artefacts might be clinical settings or the forms and templates used to capture and share information. During the pilot we heard about hard copy Dialog response forms; locally generated templates for collating information from different systems; letters and emails to GPs; images, poems or other non-text artefacts that service users might want to include in their ‘about me’ or care plan.

2. Understanding the multi-views of the group. Such groups are always a community of multiple points of view, traditions and interests. 
• Different participants in the group will have different roles and will bring to the group and their roles their own histories, language, and ‘rules’. During our Stocktake preparations and workshops we worked with psychiatrists, mental health nurses, occupational therapists, social workers, transformation leads and voluntary sector representatives, all professions and interests with their own language, approaches professional ‘rules’ but united in their interest in care plans, care planning.

3. Activity systems (like the ICSs) take shape and get transformed over periods of time. ‘Historicity’ is a term coined to express how the group’s problems and potentials can only be understood against their own history. 

 

• ‘We’ve always done it this way’, ‘that didn’t work before’, ‘it’s always like this’, ‘it wasn’t always like this’, ‘they are changing things again’, are all typical statements that often frustrate those charged with overseeing change initiatives. Without addressing the experiences that lie behind such comments you risk repeating mistakes of the past, alienating your stakeholders or just not understanding the real starting point for your transformation project. This is particularly the case for the implementation of the PCSP standard, the success of which will be largely reliant on point-of-care practices and information protocols as well as having systems which are user friendly and appropriately configured.

4. The central role of contradictions as sources of change and development. Contradictions are not the same as problems or conflicts. Contradictions are historically accumulating structural tensions within and between activity systems. Collectively addressing contradictions in how policy, practice, culture and technology interact will empower teams to find genuinely novel solutions for apparently intractable challenges, like interoperability and shared care plan/planning. 

This links to the fifth principle that:

5. the possibility of expansive transformations in activity systems. As the contradictions of an activity system are aggravated, some individual participants begin to question and deviate from its established norms. In some cases, this escalates into collaborative envisioning and a deliberate collective change effort. “An expansive transformation is accomplished when the object and motive of the activity are re-conceptualised to embrace a radically wider horizon of possibilities than in the previous mode of the activity.”