Thursday
Safeguarding Infants
The new Safeguarding Infants Toolkit has been designed to support professionals working with new and expectant parents.
It provides information on four programmes of work that are in place to support our most vulnerable group of children. These include:
- Unborn/New Born Baby Protocol
- Injuries in non-mobile infants
- Every Sleep Counts (ensuring every sleep is a safe sleep)
- ICON (coping with crying/ abusive head trauma prevention programme)
This toolkit replaces the two separate ICON and Every Sleep Counts Toolkits and introduces the Unborn/New Born Baby Protocol and injuries in non-mobile infants, to bring all of the information together in one handy resource for professionals.
Within the toolkit you will find policies and procedures as well as useful resources that can be shared with parents and carers. In particular, the universal messages of ICON and Every Sleep Counts can be given to all parents and carers when they come into contact with services to help reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) and abusive head trauma in babies. We have some excellent examples of this happening in nurseries, pre-schools, Early Help and voluntary organisations as well as through midwifery, health visiting and GPs.
You can access the Safeguarding Infants Toolkit ( on Thursday) through the HSCP website. For more information about the vulnerabilities of under ones, please take a look at the courses available through the Workforce Development sections.
Messages from senior managers
We have spoken to senior managers across our partner organisations to find out what safeguarding means to them. Play the video below to see what they had to say:
Katherine Elsmore, Hampshire, Isle of Wight, Portsmouth and Southampton Safeguarding Partner
If you do one thing…
Share information in a way that can be understood by everyone. Don’t use acronyms or jargon.
Take a look at the If you do one thing section of the Safeguarding Children Week website to access all of our key messages for professionals.
Twitter posts will be posted throughout the day in support of Safeguarding Children Week – search for #Safeguardingchildren2023