Safeguarding children and young people across our health services

Through the Child Safe Organisation Project, we are implementing key improvements across the Department to build a child safe culture that ensures the rights, safety, and wellbeing of every child and young person accessing our services.

The project is building on existing patient quality and safety approaches to implement the National Principles for Child Safe Organisations and associated child safe standards to give us the tools to safeguard the health and wellbeing of all children.

In an important first milestone for the project, we are today releasing a new Department of Health Child Safety and Wellbeing Framework for consultation and stakeholder feedback.

The framework outlines the proposed approach to safeguarding children and young people accessing our services and facilities, including expressly stating rights of children and young people, a safeguarding definition for the Department of Health, governance arrangements, education and training approaches, and best practice procedures for responding to safeguarding concerns.

The framework is also supported by guidelines on recognising the signs of harm to children and young people and disclosures of harm.

We are already making strong progress in implementing immediate changes to ensure the safety of children and young people across health services.

To support our staff to recognise and respond to child safety concerns, we are introducing mandatory child safety training for all Department of Health staff and volunteers, and this month we are piloting the child safeguarding training program with priority areas of the workforce that work with children and young people.

Importantly, we have also launched a new “Reporting Concerns of Inappropriate Behaviour Form” for the public and staff to report any behaviour that has occurred in our hospitals and health workplaces and is inappropriate or causes concern. This provides all members of the public and staff with a clear and standardised route to report any concerns to the Department, in addition to existing avenues for reporting.

Nothing is more important to our hospitals and health services than the safety and wellbeing of children, young people and vulnerable people that come into our care.

Every one of us has a personal responsibility to uphold the rights of children and young people to safely receive health care.

The consultation period has now closed. 

For further information, please visit Child Safety and Wellbeing.