What is a Practice Review?
In accordance with the Social Services and Well-being (Wales) Act 2014, Gwent Safeguarding Board has a statutory responsibility to commission Child or Adult Practice Reviews in cases when abuse or neglect of a child or adult is known or suspected and the child or adult has:
- died; or
- sustained potentially life threatening injury;
- sustained serious and permanent impairment of health or development.
A Practice Review is carried out when the people who have worked with this child or adult want to know if there are any ways in which they could do things better or differently. It’s a way for them to learn for the future and provide a better service for people.
The process for undertaking a Child or Adult Practice Review involves setting up a panel of representatives from all agencies that were involved with the child or adult. The panel is chaired by an independent person, and two independent reviewers are appointed to carry out the Review. Agencies sitting on the panel will gather information about their involvement, in order to develop a timeline of significant events that took place.
This information is presented to a multi-agency learning event, attended by practitioners who had direct involvement with the child or adult so that they can share their understanding of what has happened and identify key learning points.
The Reviewers will also meet with the family, where appropriate, to answer any questions they might have about the review and to listen to any views or opinions that they might wish to contribute. This helps to ensure that the child or adult remain central to the whole process.
Following the learning event, the independent reviewers of the case will collate and analyse all the information gathered to complete a report. This report will highlight the learning from the case, any areas of good practice and recommendations to improve future safeguarding practice.
The report will then be presented to the Regional Safeguarding Board for scrutiny and ratification, before being submitted to Welsh Government for final approval. Once finalised, all Child and Adult Practice Review reports are shared with the family and then published on our website, along with a 7 minute briefing which summarises the key points from the report.
The following link will take you to a video made by South Wales Police which explains more about the process:
Welsh Government are currently working on implementing a Single Unified Safeguarding Review process (SUSR).
What changes will this bring?
The SUSR process will replace current review systems in Wales by amalgamating them all into one review. Only one review will be carried out when one or more of the criteria of the following reviews is met: Adult Practice Review; Child Practice Review; Domestic Homicide Review; Mental Health Homicide Review; and Offensive Weapons Homicide Review. SUSR will replace all of these reviews in Wales whether it is a single review or a multiple review. Families and victims will only need to be a part of one review process which will help to reduce the impact on families. All SUSRs will be retained in the Wales Safeguarding Repository. This will help to facilitate pan-Wales training and local, regional, and national learning.