Derby and Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Partnership

Three Steps to Baby Safety Conference

KEEPING BABIES SAFE

Three Steps to Baby Safety Conference took place on Friday 2^nd July 2021 and was the first DDSCP Stakeholder Conference to focus on the learning from Children Safeguarding Practice Reviews (CSPRs) regarding babies. The Conference provided professionals and frontline practitioners, from a wide range of sectors, with the opportunity to hear insights about the latest strategies, local reviews, and national learning to protect babies from harm.

Babies are entirely dependent on their parents and carers to meet all of their needs all of the time and it is this helplessness that makes them so vulnerable.

The Derby and Derbyshire Safeguarding Children Partnership has made improving the safety of babies a priority.

The ‘Three Steps for Baby Safety’ strategy has been established to support partner agencies and professionals who work with families to ensure that the babies in Derby and Derbyshire remain safe from abuse, neglect, and harm.

The objectives of this strategy are clear.

• Learn from local and national reviews to help develop our local services
• For practitioners to have good knowledge of the three steps for baby safety – safe sleep, safe handling, and safe space
• To ensure that all new parents and carers know and understand these three messages
• To ensure that parents and carers know how to make their home safe for the baby
• That all practitioners who have contact with families with babies know and have the confidence to deliver these messages
• For these practitioners to remain professionally curious to ensure that all babies are safe and free from harm

The ongoing work of our 85 Keeping Babies Safe Champions throughout the partner agencies, the learning that is being extracted from safeguarding reviews and the informed development and delivery of a focused training programme are key to delivering this strategy with the ultimate aim of reducing the number of babies who die or who are seriously injured.

Supporting you in your work

Find out who your Keeping Babies Safe Champion is in your agency. They can help provide advice and a wide range of resources.

Please take time to familiarise yourself with these resources/key documents and share them with people you work with.

The Three Steps for Baby Safety strategy will help you gain a thorough understanding of this critical area of multi-agency work and the role you play in keeping babies safe.

‘Promoting the Safety of Babies – Learning from Reviews’ provides you with an evidenced based understanding of the key learning themes that are central to this piece of work. Please promote these documents in your workplace.

Please use the Safeguarding Children Procedures and the Keeping Babies Safe section in the DDSCP Documents Library (proceduresonline.com) to view key guidance.

A new e-learning course Protecting Babies from Harm (Level 2) is available for any professional or volunteer who works directly or indirectly with parents, unborn babies, babies or children and is aimed at raising your awareness of the vulnerability of babies to the risk of harm. The course will support you to:

• understand why babies are vulnerable to abuse and harm
• be able to identify needs and risk factors during baby's development
• know what signs and symptoms to look out for 
• understand the importance of intervening early
• know how to make a referral

The DDSCP Keeping Babies Safe – Level 3 course is available to book for 2022, for any professional or volunteer who works directly or indirectly with parents, unborn babies, babies or children and those with particular and specialised responsibility for safeguarding children and young people who contribute to assessing, planning, intervening and reviewing the needs of a child where there are safeguarding concerns, including strategic and operational managers. The course will support you to:

• describe the specific vulnerabilities of babies
• understand the risk of infant crying
• have a good knowledge of safe sleep practice, the importance of safe handling and the advice around safe baby equipment and home safety messages
• identify the issues relating to 'Shaken Baby' and bruising in babies
• describe how to develop responsive parenting
• understand learning from child practice reviews to ensure babies thrive
• recognise additional vulnerabilities in families and promote professional curiosity