Unit 4: Report and respond

4.6 Duty of care and the importance of safeguarding staff

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Organisations have a duty of care to prevent and respond to incidents of safeguarding concerns, including SEAH, against their staff.

Sexual or other forms of misconduct on staff and organisational representatives in the course of their work is a growing concern for organisations, and they need to be prepared for disclosures and how to manage them. If not managed well, disclosures of safeguarding concerns can be hugely distressing to survivors and create long-term problems for them.

When exercising an organisational duty of care, organisations should think about the following:

Are there prevention measures, policies, and procedures in place to address different forms of safeguarding concerns?
Are staff members in various roles appropriately trained? Are those expected to interact with survivors comfortable doing so?
Does the organisational culture support staff in reporting incidents of sexual violence?
Is the organisation conducting transparent, professional, and impartial investigative or inquiry processes?
Do staff members at all levels of the organisation understand their rights and obligations to the creation and maintenance of a safe and healthy workplace and living environment (often known as a ‘safeguarding culture’)?

These questions are taken from Duty of Care: Protection of Humanitarian Aid Workers from Sexual Violence. If you want to learn more about duty of care download and read the rest of this report.

Example of good practice

The Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance (WHPCA) is a membership organisation based in the UK with 350 members in 100 countries. It supports organisations such as BSMMU in Dhaka in Bangladesh, which provides palliative care to older and disabled clients in their homes.

Providing palliative care in a client’s home is a relatively new concept in Bangladesh, and it is becoming increasingly popular with young women, who view this as a noble profession, as it falls in line with their cultural values of respecting and caring for older people.

View transcript

LAILATUL FERDOUS: I am Lailatul Ferdous. I am nurse in charge of Department of Palliative Medicine BSMMU, Dhaka, Bangladesh. And actually, we offer care at the Department of Palliative Medicine in terminally ill patients, and we also offer care for the community people also.

We got support from WCHPN in the training module for safeguarding. The training involved actually courses that what is the learning and what are the types and indicators of safeguarding issues. And what are the abuses and how we should report them in our care? And how we integrate the care and manage these issues in our care?

We work with the (unclear) people. We provide service for the older people and palliative care patients who are terminally ill patients. And for them, safeguarding is an important issue because we have to protect them from any harm. When I took the safeguarding training, it’s like the solution of some of our problems. And the young people, when they do the home care for the patients, they actually face the same problem that sometimes they went in the distance area from the centre, and sometimes people tease them. Sometimes they feel some fear, and they report it after the safeguarding workshop. So, in our care provider group, we have nine women palliative care assistant and only one palliative care assistant is male.

So, the most care provided is female. Sometimes the safeguarding issue is there for their safety and from the community also.

If we find any report, then it is directly go to the head of the department and to the manager directly. After we listened from them, we just implemented that from now we should provide home care in pair. Sometimes in some home care, we send the male person because in a home care, there are two young men, the care, they are patients, and we provide the male care provider in their houses. So, this is our implementation.

When we implemented the safeguarding measures, it helped us a lot because we found it easier to give the support to our patients. Once a month we ask our patients and our staff, and they can tell us if they are happy with our care. And they trust us more after the safeguarding measures too.

Watch the video above, in which Lailatul, the head nurse at a medical hospital in Dhaka, explains the importance of safeguarding her staff (the palliative care assistants) by implementing the ‘two-adult rule’ when they travel long distances and/or work alone.

To learn more, you can follow up with these readings: