Adult serious case reviews: lessons for housing providers

Abstract

Adult Serious Case Reviews (SCRs) are conducted when there are concerns about adult safeguarding failures resulting in people not being adequately protected. Their primary aim is to enable lessons to be learned. This article reports on research to identify lessons for housing providers from SCRs by reference to the literature on SCRs and through an analysis of English housing-related SCRs. The English Care Bill proposes a statutory basis for adult safeguarding including SCRs (to become Safeguarding Adults Reviews). This may address two weaknesses of SCRs: their lack of legislative basis and the lack of obligation on agencies to cooperate. Newly developing systems methodology may address two other weaknesses: failure to disseminate learning and poor quality. The analysis of all housing-related SCRs suggested three internal lessons for housing providers: poor databases; poor monitoring; and narrow focus, not referring. Three external lessons were: exclusion from information sharing; high thresholds; and poor adult social care assessments. The article concludes with a discussion on whether lessons can be learnt from SCRs, given the complexity of safeguarding and the problems of partnership working.