Queensway Surgery work very closely with the Social Services, Health Visitors and School Nursing team to safeguard our younger patients. Families often have issues which affect children and we work together to ensure the needs and safety of our young patients are met.

Queensway ensure all our staff are up to date with their safeguarding training and we work very closely with the South East Essex Safeguarding Children Team including Health Visitors, Social Workers and other health professionals to ensure our most vulnerable children have a care plan to help them develop and feel safe. Some of our families need extra help to ensure children’s emotional and physical needs are met for a variety of reasons and for this reason we often need to share information in a responsible manner.

The word "Safeguarding" encompasses our care of all the most vulnerable members of our patient list. Adults too may be particularly vulnerable and our GPs are trained to support and refer them appropriately.

Sometimes this can involve sharing information with other health or social care agencies. We have very strict guidelines about how we share personal information of any kind and will always try to involve all of our vulnerable patients or those directly responsible for them in their care unless any delay in sharing information would be detrimental to them. This is also the case for our Child Safeguarding above.

We hold weekly meetings at Queensway with members of the other agencies often including Social Services, Housing, District Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Voluntary Support Agency, and Health Professionals which consider referrals for those patients with multiple and complex needs. At the time of writing, we are very pleased to be leading the way with this as other areas are considering following our example.

If you have any concerns about how your own, or your family’s information has been shared, we would be happy to look into individual cases.