Islington follow up report

Report: 1a
Report for the Domestic and Sexual Violence Board
Date: 15 February 2011

Sharing good practice with Westminster

The LGBT Liaison Team continue to consult with their colleagues in Westminster and are actively seeking to improve engagement, accessibility and support for victims. In particular the Team are mirroring the LGBT surgeries carried out in Westminster and have organised and publicised 3 surgeries at various venues associated with the LGBT community during February to coincide with LGBT month. The team will also be attending a number of events to support LGBT month. At the time of writing this report NI have recorded 50 more Homophobic incidents, 56 additional Homophobic offences and increased detections by 40 when compared with performance YTD for last year.

Whittington project update to MPA

As the board were informed the Victims of Violence Project at the Whittington was commissioned and funded by London Borough of Islington for 2 years from October 2009. The project, based on the Cardiff Model seeks to reduce violence in the community, with a corresponding reduction in both crime and associated injuries. There are three main domains for the project; domestic violence, serious youth violence, and elder abuse. Primarily focussing on Domestic Violence during 2010, the project will broaden its scope in 2010 to include serious youth violence and abuse of the elderly.

Following a period of piloting ways of working in 2009, by July 2010 systems to ensure effective data capture from patients attending the Emergency Department became more reliable and peaked at 90% of all patients identified at victims of violence. There exists scope for improvement in the quality of the data captured, an action plan is currently in place to achieve this.

Within the DV domain, there has been an emphasis on staff training and the implementation of policy and standard operating procedures at the Whittington for patients disclosing DV. One of the major challenges encountered has been working across local authority boundaries as only 40% of the patients were from the London Borough of Islington, 30% from Haringey and the remainder from Barnet, Enfield, Hackney and Camden. The project resulted in 8 patients with high risk of injury being referred to the MARAC (though not all to Islington). During the last six months of 2010 112 victims of domestic violence were identified within the Emergency Department (20.5% of all identified victims of violence). An enhanced referral pathway to specialist domestic violence agencies is currently being piloted working across local authority boundaries capturing over 90% of all victims of DV.

Whilst there has been no evaluation of the financial impact of the project, the following may give an indication of potential savings.

Patient Vignette A

Female patient attended ED with a fractured ankle following an prolonged incident of DV with a long term partner. Intervention of the Victims of Violence Project Clinical Nurse Specialist allowed for disclosure of DV and support from Solace Women's Aid, who assessed the patients risk of further serious injury or death as very high. In the six months prior to the admission referred to above, the patient had attended the ED on three separate occasions. In the 12 months following admission, she has not attended the Emergency Department, however her case has been re-heard at MARAC. The health costs associated with the Emergency Department attendances and inpatient admission for this patient in 2009 were £7000, there have been no health costs occurred at the Whittington in 2010.

A preliminary analysis of the total cost of identified victims of violence to the Emergency Department at the Whittington is estimated to be at least £200,000 for 2010.

LGBT/Safeguarding Adults hotline update.

Islington LGBT team re-launched in August/September. The promotion of the mobile telephone hotline number for members of the LGBT community to speak directly to a LGBT liaison officer was incorporated in the relaunch. The number was publicised on various posters and stationary and left in LGBT venues. As a result of this the LGBT team received a number of calls ranging from requests for advice to harassment issues. These are from members of the LGBT community who have said they would otherwise not have contacted the police. These people have also passed the number on to friends who have also contacted the Liaison team for advice. The relaunch and promotion of the LGBT team has resulted in an increase in crime/incident reporting and related intelligence. Funding has recently been authorised for the purchase of merchandise branded with the hotline number. These items will be handed to members of the community attending surgeries and events.

The Islington Adult Safeguarding Board ran a publicity campaign last year which promoted a dedicated number for the social services access team. This was part of the 'Stop Adult Abuse' campaign which was in line with the Board's strategy to 'Make sure everyone in Islington knows that safeguarding adults means and what they can do about it'. The campaign focussed on staff and volunteers working in health, social care and related organisations. It also focused on people using these services. Around 1000 posters and 6000 leaflets were sent out to over 400 locations. Six key partners created new safeguarding adults web-pages on their websites. These partners also published articles about safeguarding adults in their staff and user bulletins/newsletters.

The number was advertised on posters distributed to various care establishments, police buildings and local authority premises. The number was launched in the local press and advertised on bill boards at some bus stops in the Borough.

We do not yet have the exact numbers of alerts and referrals for this period so we cannot evaluate the impact of the campaign from this perspective. In the summer we sent out evaluation questions across Islington to gauge the effectiveness of the campaign. 31% of respondents said that they had seen the posters and leaflets. The Board are currently looking into joint communications initiatives with the Islington Safeguarding Children Board, to make the most of our resources.

Islington SCD2 data on unsupported prosecutions, as well as the remaining missing data from report.

With regards to the missing data, there were 3 Repeat Victimisation Crimes which as a % works out at 2.65 of all of SCD2 Sexual Offences for Islington. There were 19 feedback forms distributed during the period of review. Recent statistics show that the number of surveys sent have increased significantly above these numbers as a consequence of increased supervision and distribution by SOITS. With regards to unsupported prosecutions, there have been 0 for Islington SCD2.

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