Delivering safeguarding children services in primary care: responding to national child protection policy

This study set out to examine how Primary Care Organisations (PCOs) in England manage, organise and deliver their safeguarding children responsibilities.

In the light of changing organisational configurations across primary care, a wealth of policy directives and a climate of extensive media attention around child protection, this paper focuses on how PCOs respond to national policy and deliver safeguarding children services.

This study, based in England, United Kingdom (UK), used a telephone survey method incorporating semi-structured qualitative interviews with Designated Child Protection Nurses. A maximum variation sampling strategy was used to identify two to three PCOs within each of the original 28 Strategic Health Authority sites. From the 64 PCOs approached, 60 Designated Nurses or their representatives agreed to participate in the research, with a response rate of 94%. Data analysis was informed primarily by Lincoln and Guba's (1985) three stages of a) unitising, b) categorising and c) pattern search.

The findings outline how and to what extent PCOs respond to the national policy and organise and deliver their child protection services. The paper highlights some of the key challenges facing PCOs, in particular, safeguarding moving off the primary care agenda, child protection staff recruitment difficulties, a proliferation and overload of policy, resource implications for additional staff training, challenges to collaborative working, high referral thresholds to social care services and cutbacks in public health nursing services. This paper concludes by offering some suggestions about how child protection services could be improved as primary care faces another major reorganisation with the demise of Primary Care Trusts in April 2013.