Whether you've been practising medicine for 30 minutes or 30
years, dealing with the issue of safeguarding is one of the biggest challenges
for any of us. We are told that there
are several must do’s such as:
Wait a minute... I
know the list goes on but those first two are quite enough to deal with before
we process any more. What those two
statements mean in practice is that the minute I've thought of a way that this
could be a safeguarding issue, I am doing mental gymnastics
trying to figure out the following things:
If this comes easily to you then you have my
admiration. For the mortals among us
it is so challenging that at some point most of us have wished that there was no concern or that we didn't have to
be the one that brought it up. You have
to be careful though, because when you find yourself wishing for these things
you might just do something to make them happen. It is within
your power to explain the concern away.
It is possible to refer to
someone else who will take your concern further without telling the parents. Neither of these are good ‘ways out’.
The problem is that we often see the way forward as a choice or a judgement on the situation. This choice forces us to feel as though we are choosing sides which is intuitively at odds with our instinct to be on the side of the
parents.
There is a solution that I believe does work:
Schrodinger’s safeguarding. [If you
don’t know about Schrodinger’s cat (a mixture of quantum physics and animal
abuse that makes sense in a strange way) then don’t worry.] The principle that I want you to get you head
around is this:
In
this way you can overcome all the barriers to dealing with the problem.
Because you treat the concern as fully real:
- You will act in the best interest of the child. You will explore the concern until satisfied.
- You will involve all the right people.
- You will ask all the right questions and document things in far more detail than you would normally.
- You will tell the parents that you have a concern because you can’t do the first three things adequately without them noticing that something is going on.
Because you treat the concern as fully false you will come
across differently and the parents will sense your open-mindedness:
- You will come across as non-judgemental. You will be able to be matter of fact about the need for the safeguarding concern to be raised and answered and they will sense that you have not judged them.
- You will keep the health of the child as a top priority. The parents will have come with their own agenda and you will remember to address that just as you would have normally. This also helps parents to see that you have not de-humanised them.
So next time you have a safeguarding concern, do put it back in the box. Not a Pandora’s box but a Schrodinger’s box. You're not making a judgement but you do need to do both of your jobs.
Edward Snelson
@sailordoctor
Disclaimer: Damn it
Jim, I'm a doctor not a quantum
physicist.
