Safeguarding Adults Week

RWP's Director of Housing Operations, Annette Stevens, blogs about the upcoming week's activities and why understanding adult safeguarding is so important.

"As a housing association, safeguarding runs through everything we do. We are a diverse organisation and I’m proud that we support so many vulnerable people. RWP is the largest provider of supported living in the country, providing over 4,000 supported living tenancies to autistic adults and people with a learning disability. We also provide services for people with long-term mental health conditions.

RWP is part of Progress Housing Group which also provides social housing to other vulnerable groups and manages a range of services supporting victims of domestic abuse and people at risk of homelessness. 

In these modern times there are now even more new potential sources of harm. Lockdown increased the number of people at risk of exploitation as many people became more isolated. It is important that we are able to recognise the risk of harm and abuse in whatever form it may take.

It is sometimes so hard to start difficult conversations, for example where we suspect self-neglect. This week is our time to develop our understanding and learn how we can approach challenging situations.

We are supporting the Ann Craft Trust to highlight and raise awareness of key themes throughout this week. These are:

• Monday - Exploitation and County Lines
• Tuesday - Self-neglect
• Wednesday - Creating Safer Organisational Cultures
• Thursday - Elder Abuse
• Friday - Domestic Abuse in Tech-Society
• Saturday and Sunday - Safeguarding in Everyday Life

What will we be doing this week?  

We’ll be signposting people to our easy read safeguarding section on our RWP website, too. It explains all different types of abuse in an easy read format so that autistic adults and people with a learning disability can easily understand. We’re looking to raise awareness of modern slavery and domestic abuse, and will be ensuring safeguarding training is available to our colleagues throughout the week.

So, what is the one thing I feel we should all know about Safeguarding Adults? It is about safety and wellbeing. There are some situations we may come across where a situation is impacting a vulnerable person so much that they are unsafe. Or it impacts their wellbeing - this is safeguarding too."