Sentinel Safeguarding Adults is a web-based, incident management system allowing local authorities and their partner agencies to capture referrals involving vulnerable adults and to manage such incidents through to closure. Information sharing, through a powerful, central database, supported by locally defined protocols, promotes effective, collaborative working to protect vulnerable adults at home or in supervised accommodation and to bring perpetrators to justice.
Sentinel SA provides a comprehensive database for information about referrals, the people or places involved, the actions taken by each agency, evidence gathered and outcomes for victims and perpetrators. This makes Sentinel SA the ideal reporting tool for supporting case conferences, strategy meetings and for providing incident statistics and trends to stakeholders, council members and government offices.
Shared data and protocols bring speed, efficiency and an effective response to family, professional or public complaints about alleged abuse. Sentinel SA can be set to e-mail action notices to care teams or agency officers, if the complaint is serious or the victim is at risk. Where an incident requires follow up action, personnel responsible will be reminded by prompts at logon.
Collaborative working does not imply additional work or duplicated data entry. Sentinel SA shares the load by defining roles and responsibilities within agencies, asks for minimum input from those with the information and integrates with existing, operational systems to gather information previously recorded. Sentinel is scalable to support a single authority or regional partnership.
Recording complaints - referrals from vulnerable adults, family, carers, institutions or agency officers can be recorded directly into Sentinel, using a customised, on-screen form. Alternatively, incidents already captured by departmental or agency operational systems can be fed directly into the Sentinel database.
Reviewing incidents - once a complaint is captured, the system alerts the individual or team responsible for its management. The delegated people then review the information for completeness and set in motion the required workflow. Sentinel SA is designed to collect key data such as multiple abuse, perpetrator profile, details of institutions and the employers of alleged perpetrators
Victim support - the system includes triggers to initiate an early response to and contact with victims, especially the elderly, infirm or those regarded at risk.
Collation & referral - where an incident or series of incidents is seen to have a serious impact on victims or their families, the system assists users to find relationships or common threads between them. This builds up a comprehensive picture of the alleged abuse that can be escalated for further action.
Case management - Sentinel allows its users to react to and manage individual complaints or incidents. However, as a pattern emerges based on individuals, employers or institutions, the responsible officer is provided with case management tools to investigate and report on the wider picture, typically taking one or more individuals through various warnings and ultimately to prosecution.
Offender management - the single source of information accelerates an effective response to end the abuse, to take control of the offender's actions or to move the victim to a place of safety.
Reporting - Sentinel includes an inbuilt report generator, which can be used to produce regular and ad hoc reports, trends and analysis to focus agency activity on individuals, employers or institutions.
Built with web technology - Sentinel was conceived as a web-based application, not modified to suit. This means that it can be accessed at any time, from any place, using internet, intranet, extranet or wireless technology.
Industry standard user interface - User access is through standard browsers, providing a common-place, intuitive interface to all system functions and requiring a minimum of training for any user with basic computing skills.
Customer configuration - Sentinel is a fully configured application but it also provides customer branding and user configuration. Drop-down lists, incident classification and protocols are all user definable and maintainable.
Development roadmap - Sentinel SA is part of the wider Sentinel family and continues to develop over time. The roadmap is a timetable for new modules, features and enhancements, and is published regularly.
Information security - Information is shared only to the levels defined by the customer. Secure, individual user logon profiles allow access to system functions and data.
Systems and processes intended to provide levels of protection for adults considered vulnerable to abuse pre-dated the launch of No Secrets in 2000. In various parts of England, and indeed other nations of the United Kingdom, there were people and organisations working to improve and introduce levels of support and protection, and it was their work that the No Secrets guidance sought to build upon, enhance and extend across the country. For this reason the guidance should be considered a milestone in adult protection, and the starting point of this project work.
This Report has significant importance on at least two levels. We now have five years of data on adult protection intervention. But such data is only useful if it can be analysed and used to inform social policy planning, and thereby improve protective processes. The Report contributes to such planning. But secondly, data analysis can only be effective if it can compare like for like; it is imperative that we understand why one area of activity is so different from another and we can only do so when we have confidence in the interpretation of the data provided. By providing such guidance on interpretation the Report also contributes to our increased understanding of the issues involved.
