Posted By John Webster
No, its not about managing the violence and aggression that breaks out when we work with the LA :-)

There are many areas where NHS and LA, particularly Community Social Services and Education, work together in providing services to the community. Examples might be NHS nursing staff in LA care homes, NHS paediatric occupational therapists in LA special needs schools etc.

Although at an operational level the arrangements work well, and there are joint committees to co-ordinate the arrangements, each organisation has its own policies and procedures.

Huge cultural and structural differences mean that truly joint policies and procedures are just not feasible at the moment - although they are a future objective.

So we have a situation where two people working together could respond differently to the same incident, using different techniques and applying different sanctions.

What is needed is an over-arching joint policy, which recognises the differences in individual organisation policies and procedures but which clearly sees them as complimentary and unequivocally guides both sets of staff on how they should work together and which policy applies and when.

Any thoughts gratefully received, especially from anyone who has already trod this path.

John

Posted By John Webster
Thanks Kim, couldn't agree with you more. V&A is just the one I have on my "to-do list" today.

The Scottish Islands are in a fairly unique position in that the boundary of each of the Health Boards (Orkney, Shetland and Eilean Siar) is coterminal with that of the respective Local Authority.

So clearly there is scope for the development of a whole range of joint and shared services. I suppose the ultimate (H&S) goal would be a shared Health & Safety Policy signed by the CEs of both organisations, but that, even if it is on someone's wish list, is some way off yet.

So for now, I will content myself with devising joint policy statements to link otherwise unconnected policies and proceedures on the same topic. So far for V&A, I have thought to make this a statement binding the 2 organisations to the same shared objectives, the same zero tolerance approach and committing each to ensuring similar standards of risk assessment, similar standards of staff training, similar access to post incident de-briefing, support and counselling and a shared approach to imposing sanctions on aggressors where necessary. It would also need to provide for inter-agency sharing of the significant findings of risk assessment and information about "problem"patients/clients insofar as is permitted by Data Protection. Finally, we have to be clear about who will be responsible for incident recording and investigation and dissemination of information.

So is there anything I have missed?

John