What is Making Safeguarding Personal?
Making Safeguarding Personal (MSP) is about professionals working with adults at risk to ensure that they are making a difference to their lives. Considering, with them, what matters to them so that the interventions are personal and meaningful. It should empower, engage and inform individuals so that they can prevent and resolve abuse and neglect in their own lives and build their personal resilience. It must enhance their involvement, choice and control as well as improving quality of life, wellbeing and safety.
It is not “just another process”, it underpins all your interactions and involvement with the adult at risk. Processes should fit around the person to ensure that the persons views remain central in the safeguarding journey.
There should be “no decision about me without me”
What does good practice look like?
- Always speaking to the adult at risk
- Gathering opinions, views and helping the person to achieve the outcomes that are important to them
- Focus on strengths e.g. what they do well, are good at?
- Involves others around the person that they think it is important to speak to
- Involves an advocate where wanted or required
- Makes sure the adult understands all options open to them, including why some options are not available or achievable
- Develops plans to address risks
- If the person decides that they want to live with that risk, for example in a case of self neglect, that they understand the risks and any actions that they can take to reduce those risks.
Making Safeguarding Personal is not…….
- An excuse to stop working with someone who doesn’t want anything to happen
- A tick box exercise
- Unfocussed chat with people at risk
- Unsuitable for those that lack Mental Capacity
- An opportunity to move forward a plan based on what you think is best for the person without working in partnership