Safeguarding Children within a Dental Practice

Course Aim

This course empowers the entire dental team to confidently apply the principles of child safeguarding in their daily practice. It focuses on embedding a child-centered approach to recognize risks, protect welfare, and fulfil professional and legal responsibilities effectively.

Objectives

By the end of this course, learners will be able to:

• Identify Risks: Recognize signs of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse or neglect using a child-focused lens. This includes specific risks such as domestic abuse, child sexual exploitation (CSE), grooming, radicalization, FGM, modern slavery, and gang activity.
• Support Looked-After Children: Implement the correct legal and procedural requirements for looked-after children, ensuring their unique care needs are met.
• Collaborate Effectively: contribute confidently to inter-agency assessments by gathering relevant facts, sharing information securely, and documenting concerns with the precision required for legal and child protection purposes.
• Drive Improvement: Assess team training needs and lead departmental updates to maintain high standards.
• Support the Team: Deliver effective supervision or peer review, while recognizing and managing the emotional impact of safeguarding work on professional staff.
• Learn from Experience: Apply lessons from clinical audits and Safeguarding Practice Reviews (formerly Serious Case Reviews) to enhance practice policies.
• Guide Information Sharing: Advise colleagues on when and how to share information appropriately and legally.
• Engage in Reviews: Contribute meaningfully to serious case reviews, child death review processes, and domestic homicide reviews, seeking expert guidance when necessary.
• Escalate Complex Cases: Recognize when a situation exceeds personal expertise and know exactly how to obtain higher-level support.
• Lead Collaboration: Participate in, and potentially chair, multidisciplinary meetings and peer reviews.

Learning Outcomes

Upon completion, learners will have a deep understanding of:

• Nature of Maltreatment: What constitutes child maltreatment and how parental or carer behaviour impacts the physical and emotional development of children and young people.
• Forensic Awareness: The specific forensic procedures relevant to child maltreatment cases.
• Risk Assessment: How to undertake a robust assessment of risk and harm.
• Effective Communication: How to communicate sensitively with children and young people, ensuring their voice is heard and they participate in decisions affecting them, appropriate to their age and ability.
• Decision Making & Escalation: How to make considered professional judgments when a child needs protection, including the correct protocols for escalating concerns.
• Management Planning: How to formulate and communicate effective, multidisciplinary management plans for children who have experienced maltreatment.
• Diagnostic Challenges: The complexities and risks surrounding misdiagnosis in safeguarding and child protection contexts.

GDC Development Outcomes

This course meets the criteria for GDC Development Outcomes:

• A: Effective communication with patients, the dental team, and others across dentistry.
• D: Maintenance of skills, behaviours, and attitudes which maintain patient confidence in you and the dental profession and put patients’ interests first.