Unit 7 - Principles of Safe Practice in Health and Social Care
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Unit 7 Part 1 Coursework
Duty of care is a professional’s legal obligation to act in the best interest of individuals and others in
order to ensure their safety and wellbeing. You should not act or fail to act in a way that could
potentially cause harm and should act within your competency; not doing anything that you do not feel
you can do safely [SCIE 2012]. Every professional will receive a document which contains the guidelines
for their duty of care in their setting. This document is called a code of conduct and you are expected to
follow this at all times as a health and social care professional. One strength of duty of care is a
professional’s code of conduct. It clearly outlines an individual’s responsibilities and the expectations
placed upon them by their position as a health and social care professional. They clearly set the
standards the setting has for their employees and encourage individuals to act within the guidelines of
their code of conduct to uphold their duty of care [DeltaNet 2021]. Failing your duty of care can lead to
you being struck off the professional register thus preventing you from further practice in any health or
social care setting, however, this is not the only/ultimate outcome. When a professional has failed their
duty of care, they will partake in a tribunal case to discuss their training. If they are able to ‘excuse’ their
behaviour efficiently then they will be allowed another chance and will not be instantly struck off the
professional register. Having such a firm and severe consequence as this one is another strength of duty
of care as it applies pressure to professionals and acts as motivation for why an individual would want to
uphold their duty if care at all costs since they wish to continue working in the health and social care
sector and not get permanently struck off the professional register. It is a driving force for professionals
to fulfil their duty of care and uphold the standards of their setting which increases the quality of service
and improves conditions for its service users. However, a weakness of Duty of care is that failing duty of
care and having to go through this procedure is often time-consuming as well as expensive and can
damage a setting’s public reputation. This can, in some cases, affect the staff’s morale as well as deter
current and future service users from the setting causing it to lose business, which could even lead to
the establishment being closed down in extreme cases [EduCare 2021].
The ultimate purpose of maintaining your duty of care is to create a safe work environment for
individuals and service users; there are many responsibilities that a professional has in order to achieve
this. Acting within your competency, for example, is important for maintaining safe practice because it
ensures you do not cause any unintentional harm like giving a misdiagnosis to an individual because you
lack the proper first aid training and thus leaving a potential bigger problem to go unnoticed. In this
case, you should always try your best to refer the individual to the correct person who has the required
qualification and knowledge to treat the individual correctly, rather than trying to do it yourself. Another
responsibility for your duty of care is handling documents correctly and making accurate records. This is
essential for keeping current and future service users safe. For example, if medical records are taken
correctly, the patient's information is accurate and available to any doctor who might see them. This will
keep them safe and ensure that no accidental harm comes from receiving the wrong treatment.
Handling complaints efficiently is also a part of your duty of care. Complaints highlight issues within the
setting and by handling them correctly you can improve the setting for future service as well as prevent
harm from potentially harmful issues brought to light by complaints. The key purpose of these
responsibilities is to protect service users from harm and promote their wellbeing at all times
[SkillsForCare 2021]. These responsibilities are all strengths of duty of care as they ensure that all
individuals are kept safe from direct and indirect harm as much as possible which is an essential part of
your duty of care as a professional. Whether an individual truly understands their role as a professional
,or not, performing these responsibilities efficiently ensures that duty of care is upheld to a high
standard.
At ‘Going Forward’ Training Centre for young adults with learning disabilities they display some
examples of maintaining their duty of care. They have properly qualified staff employed there who are
trained to work with individuals who have learning disabilities, which is a clear demonstration of their
duty of care being upheld because by employing the correct staff with the proper training and
knowledge, they minimize the risk of accidental or unintentional harm coming to their service users and
increase the likelihood of all staff members being able to work and act efficiently and within their
competency. They also ensure that their service users are provided with high quality care that meets
their individual needs. The purpose of the Centre is to help young adults with learning disabilities plan
and start their careers and futures. From the evidence provided in the case study, I can assume that the
Centre is, in fact, doing that as Sally and Theo are both attending a course at the Centre. This could be an
example of a strength of the practice at ‘Going Forward’ as it suggests that young adults are receiving
the aid that they need at the Centre and are benefitting from it, not only for taking steps towards their
futures but also in forming bonds and friendships that could potentially last a lifetime. Sally and Theo
both find common ground in the fact that they both suffer from epilepsy and this may strengthen the
relationship they have with one another as they may feel that they truly understand what the other
person is going through. They may also be able to help each other in a more personal way that
professionals can’t do which can make them feel more comfortable and less alone at the Centre. Any
social setting is an opportunity for friendship to blossom and part of a training Centre's purpose is to
bring people together, help them and make them feel comfortable and happy; encouraging friendship
helps them achieve this and can boost service users morale and encourage them to make full use of the
facilities there. This, in turn, means that the setting is fulfilling their duty of care to provide high quality
service to their users, make them feel safe and help them build a brighter future for themselves. From
my case study, I can also infer that the Training Centre had a regime in place where authorised staff
members were assigned to deliver medication at the correct times. This helps maintain safe practice as
it ensures that the right person receives the correct medication at the appropriate time, and no one is
harmed from being given the wrong medicine or not being given the medicine on time. Having
appropriately trained staff is a large strength at the Training Centre as it upholds their duty of care to
keep their service users safe and, again, ensure they are receiving a high-quality service that they can
safely make the most of. It also may make the users and their parents feel reassured that staff can be
trusted and utilised to the extent that the Centre offers. Part of their duty of care is to not only ensure
that their users are physically safe, but that they also feel safe and are comfortable enough to use the
facility as it should be used without being anxious or hesitant. Lastly, ‘Going Forward’ has a complaints
procedure online for service users to make use of whenever they feel like. The staff inform service users
that they can find the form online thus promoting complaints procedures which is an example of good
practice as it allows attention to be drawn to potentially serious issues which will make improvements to
the setting and make it safer for both current and future service users.
Although duty of care is vitally important for safe practice and there are many rules to ensure that
professionals carry out their responsibilities for upholding this, Duty of care is a grey area. This is yet
another weakness of Duty of care as it leaves large room for error. Certain circumstances are quite
complicated and difficult to solve as there will always be external factors that affect individuals and their
decisions. There will be many occasions where the event of an individual failing their duty of care does
,not have a clear answer, consequence or solution. There will be times when it is not clear what the
‘right’ decision to make is. For example, if a patient has gone out of control, it is part of a professional’s
duty of care to stay with them and do everything in their power to make sure that the patient is safe and
doesn’t cause harm to themselves or other service users. However, if the patient then attacks the
professional and they feel unsafe, they may decide to either restrain or evade the patient. However,
according to the responsibilities that are part of a professional’s duty of care, they should have stayed
with the patient and put the patient first instead of themselves. Although, many other individuals may
have acted in the same manor if placed in the same scenario. Therefore, this is a grey area since it is not
entirely clear what the ‘right’ thing to do was and many people will have a different opinion on whether
it was or wasn’t.
There are many dilemmas that can affect someone’s willingness or ability to maintain duty of care. The
first example is relationships. This can include relationships with peers like staff members or service
users, which must remain professional in order to uphold standards. If your relationship breaches a
professional level and becomes closely personal, this can have a negative effect on work and service
users. For example, not performing DBS checks for the volunteers at your primary school because you
know them and have a personal relationship with them. This can put your students at risk and in doing
so you are failing your duty of care to maintain safe practice in your setting. In some cases, someone
who you have a pre-existing relationship with can become involved in your health or social care setting.
In this circumstance, you must report your relationship with the individual to your manager so that you
are not involved in their case. This is necessary as relationships between service users and professionals
can promote bias and favouritism and can lead to a professional’s loyalties being questioned. As well as
this, your duties will require you to occasionally break confidentiality for the service user’s safety. If you
have a personal relationship with a service user it may tempt you to keep quiet about issues that should
be reported because you don’t want to break their trust and potentially jeopardise your relationship,
however, it is your duty to do so and failing to report valuable information, like if the person is suffering
from abuse, would be failing your duty of care. [Stephens, L. 2010] Having an internal view of hierarchy
in a relationship can also be an issue as it may cause an individual to feel as if they cannot question
someone in a higher position than them which can lead problems to go unaddressed and the setting
becoming unsafe due to an individual feeling as if they could not or should not say anything because
they are in a ‘lower’ position.
A second example of a dilemma is morals. An individual’s personal beliefs can have a huge effect on
their actions and can cause unprofessional bias. Morals can cause you to convince someone to act
differently because of your personal views, for example, trying to talk a teenager out of an abortion
because of your morals and beliefs. This would be letting your personal opinion interfere with someone
else's life and would be considered wrong as the service user should be allowed to make their own
decisions without the influence of the professional. Preconceptions and judgments are another dilemma
that could prevent someone from fulfilling their duty of care. A professional’s expectations or
assumptions could influence how they behave towards a service user and lead them to fail their duty of
care. For example, you may not expect someone who comes from a wealthy family to be a victim of
abuse, and this may cause you not to dig deeper into their case; leaving that person in the abusive
situation and thus failing to maintain their safety and wellbeing which consequently leads you to fail
your duty of care. As a professional you should not let private opinions get in the way of providing
efficient service for individuals, however, this can still happen in certain cases.
, Another dilemma that can cause a professional to not fulfil their duty of care is personal protection. Fear
has a large influence on people’s actions and sometimes even a professional will fear repercussions of
their actions and in such cases may try to cover up and hide their mistake. However, by doing so you are
failing your duty of care. This is not uncommon as every professional will know that failing their duty of
care will result in a tribunal case and possibly have them struck off the professional register and ending
their career in the health and social care sector. Because of this awareness, a professional may be
tempted to try and make their mistakes go unnoticed for self-preservation and personal protection. This
can happen in many ways like withholding information, not documenting certain occurrences in the
reports, lying and even forging documents in extreme cases. All these actions, amongst many others,
would all be considered as failing your duties as a health or social care professional.
The final dilemma which could have an impact on an individual’s maintenance of their duty of care is
human error, including pressures and restrictions. Sometimes, failure can simply be a result of a trivial
error which all humans are capable of, such as forgetting something. This doesn’t make you a poor
professional, it just means you made a simple error. However, in a health and social care setting, trivial
errors can have lasting impacts. For example, if you forget to record that you’ve given a service user
their medication and another staff member sees the empty record and decides to give the patient their
medication ‘late’, this can cause serious problems to the service user as they could overdose on
medication and end up hospitalised or, if on particularly strong medication, dead. Two more factors that
could contribute to the failure to uphold duty of care are pressures and restrictions. In certain situations,
you may feel pressure to get things done even when you know that you should not be doing them. An
instance where this is the case could be if your setting is understaffed and your manager instructs you to
do something that you know you are not qualified for. In this case, an individual would feel the strain of
being restricted in staff members and the pressure of following the instructions given to them even
though they are not qualified to fulfil it and they could decide to carry out the action anyway and act out
of their competency to obey the manager and compensate for the short staffing. However, if you feel
that an instruction is not safe, you should not follow them; whether that be to perform a task with
unsafe equipment, work in an unsafe environment or even just to carry out unclear instructions. [Unison
2013]. Regardless of the circumstances, if you perform a task that is unsafe then you would be failing to
meet the responsibilities of your duty of care and could get you struck off the professional register.
‘Going Forward’ Training Centre faced a number of these dilemmas which lead them to fail their duty of
care as an establishment. The first example of this is when they allowed unauthorised staff to distribute
medication to patients when the Centre was busy. This is a huge issue as it puts the patients’ safety at
risk where they could be given the wrong medication, the incorrect amount of medication or not given
the medication at all. In this instance, the Centre being busy created the dilemma of pressure as the
patients would all still need their needs to be met regardless of how busy the setting was. If all the
authourised staff members were unavailable, the unauthorized ones may have been instructed to step
in and give out the medication despite the fact they are not qualified to do so. Consequently, the
pressure of following instructions, the demand of patients and the business of the Centre will have
caused the staff at ‘Going Forward’ to act out of their competency, put patients at risk and fail their duty
of care. This is an example of where the weakness of duty of care being a grey area becomes an issue as
it could be argued that if there was no qualified staff available, should they have left the patients
without any medication and potentially risk the consequences of them receiving no medication? Or
should they administer each patient’s assigned medicine despite not being qualified to do so and risk
mistakes and accidents occurring from people being given the wrong medication? What is the ‘right’
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