The Merseyside Safeguarding Adults Review Group (MSARG) is a collaboration between relevant organisations in the Local Authority areas of Knowsley, Sefton, St Helens and Wirral.
The MSARG will consider all Safeguarding Adult Review (SAR) referrals submitted, in order to establish if the referral meets the criteria for a SAR and will then make recommendations to the relevant Safeguarding Adult Board Chair as to whether it should be undertaken.
SAR’s are undertaken so that lessons can be learned from the case and those lessons applied to future cases to prevent similar harm occurring again.
It is a multi-agency process that considers the learning that can be identified in the circumstances of each case and is not about assigning blame to any organisation or individual. Organisations will have their own internal procedures to review practice and raise standards, such as complaints, audits and serious incident investigations. A SAR does not duplicate any of those processes, as the focus is on multi-agency learning through consideration of how agencies worked together, with the intention of improving how they do so in the future.
Criteria for conducting a Safeguarding Adult Review:
Section 44 of the Care Act (2014) states that the Safeguarding Adult Board (SAB) must arrange a SAR when an adult with needs for care and support (whether or not the local authority has been meeting any of those needs) if:
- there is reasonable cause for concern about how the SAB, members of it or other persons with relevant functions worked together to safeguard the adult, and
- the adult has died, and
- the SAB knows or suspects that the death resulted from abuse or neglect (whether or not it knew about or suspected the abuse or neglect before the adult died)
Or
- the adult is still alive and the SAB knows or suspects that the adult has experienced serious abuse or neglect.
SAR referral
Any person or agency may make a referral to the MSARG where they consider that the circumstances causing the concern meets the above criteria. You can download a referral form and return it once completed returned to [email protected].