Safeguarding children

Southampton University Hospitals Trust has the responsibility for providing a range of services for children and young people.

We take the responsibility of caring for children and young people very seriously and have a process in place for assuring ourselves that our procedures for safeguarding this group of patients are effective and safe.

The Trust Board| named lead for safeguarding children is Judy Gillow, director of nursing and she is responsible for ensuring that safeguarding policies and procedures are regularly reviewed. There is also a named doctor for safeguarding, Dr Michael Roe, a named nurse, Dr Sarah Steele, and a named midwife, Sister Sandy Denton.

We take a number of steps to protect children and young people including:

• Training our staff. We require all staff to complete an appropriate level of training in child safeguarding as part of our mandatory training programme and compliance with training requirements is regularly monitored by our Trust Board.
• Implementing safeguarding systems. The Trust has a comprehensive set of child protection policies which are up to date and regularly reviewed. The policies include a system for following up children who fail to attend appointments at the hospital or for whom there are safeguarding concerns.
• Checking our staff. We meet the statutory requirements for carrying out criminal record bureau checks on our staff and this has been the subject of recent audit and discussion at Trust Board.

The links on the right hand side of this page are to the papers and documents that were discussed at an open meeting of the SUHT Trust Board in September 2009|. The Trust Board confirmed at that meeting that they were satisfied that all the necessary arrangements for Safeguarding Children were in place in the Trust and would be kept under review.