The Safeguarding Project: how nurses and midwives can enact change for children in Australia

In Australia, there is no single source to guide nurses' and midwives' approaches to keeping children safe from abuse and neglect. This is despite the release of the National Framework for Child Protection 2009-2020 more than ten years ago proposing a multidisciplinary public health approach to keeping children safe. In contrast, the United Kingdom has implemented the ‘Working Together to Safeguard Children: a guide to inter-agency working to safeguard and promote the welfare of children' framework to guide interprofessional collaboration. In this UK framework, a safeguarding approach aims to promote the health, safety and wellbeing of all children, and including identifying and responding to child abuse and neglect. In Australia, there is no equivalent inter-professional guidance, and poor interdisciplinary collaboration is continually implicated in the deaths of children known to child protection services.

Nurses and midwives are the largest group of health professionals and they have unique capacity to enact change through their work with Australian children and families. Nurses’ and midwives’ roles in mandatory reporting are clearly defined, but their broader roles in safeguarding children are poorly understood and largely invisible. This is despite evidence that nurses actively identify, prevent, address and mitigate the impacts of child abuse, especially in settings where they work directly with children and families. A lack of consensus and understanding of how nurses and midwives contribute to safeguarding is a significant barrier to mobilising this large, highly educated and pre-existing workforce to make a difference for Australian children.

In Australia, there is little research into the nature of nurses’ and midwives’ roles in safeguarding children across their diverse range of child-focussed practice settings. A comprehensive understanding of nurses’ and midwives’ contributions to safeguarding children in child-focussed settings would have many advantages. Firstly, increased knowledge of nursing and midwifery roles can facilitate shared understandings to underpin high-quality, coordinated multidisciplinary care for vulnerable children. Furthermore, it would inform targeted professional development to enhance nursing and midwifery knowledge and skills to safeguard children. The development of shared inter-disciplinary understandings of nursing and midwifery role will also inform the development of professional practice standards that can guide operational planning, promote consistency and enable evaluation of care.

The first stage of the Safeguarding Project will use a Delphi study methodology to explore the nature and scope of nursing and midwifery safeguarding roles across child-focussed settings in Australia. The findings will provide shared understandings and guide future directions in nursing and midwifery education, professional development, and mobilisation of the professions enact change for vulnerable children. Furthermore, greater knowledge of the nature and scope of nurses’ and midwives’ roles in safeguarding can inform the development of safeguarding practice standards in collaboration with industry partners. Ultimately, by better understanding nursing and midwifery practice, we will be better placed to make a difference for vulnerable children in Australia.

For more information about the Safeguarding Project, please get in touch on lauren.lines@flinders.edu.au or subscribe to my blog for regular updates.