Safeguarding Adults Boards – Commissioning

A SAB is not in the main a commissioning body. Primarily, SABs achieve their goals indirectly, through their agency members and through their partnerships with other boards and agencies. A SAB will want, for example, assurance from commissioning bodies that they are commissioning safe services and have the means and capacity to act when a provider does not safeguard its patients/clients, or does not do so in a personalised way.

However, SABs will have to commission safeguarding adults reviews and may wish to commission other pieces of work, including joint training, development of their websites, promotional materials and support posts. Some SABs develop strategies to describe how they will work in partnership across commissioning agencies to ensure that safeguarding is a priority. This can promote:

Examples of outcomes include:

Issues to consider include:

SABs may wish to commission some additional work themselves and secure funding to enable them to do so. This may, for example, be to test out an approach or to commission some research.

The statutory guidance reflects the need for SABs to engage with other partnerships to share intelligence, but it can also be important to share commissioning intelligence and other information between neighbouring SABs, or children/adults boards where they are separate in the same authority. For example, there may be situations in which one local authority stops commissioning services from a care provider because of safeguarding concerns, but a neighbouring local authority continues to commission. In instances such as this, sharing intelligence between commissioners could be helpful.