Protecting people is at the heart of what we do at the Care Inspectorate.
We have recently improved our protection procedure. It provides all staff with clear guidance of our intent and overarching proactive approach to protecting people, through both our scrutiny of care services and developing our workforce.
We have updated the procedure to reflect the updated national adult and child protection guidance (2022 and 2023) and include:
- updates legislation and policy guidance
- revised terminology for protection matters.
The updated procedures focus on protecting people experiencing care but also apply to concerns about staff, visitors or anyone involved in care.
What’s changing
We have introduced a robust process which does not rely solely on inspectors making judgements about notifications of harm. We have agreed that we will follow up every notification of harm we receive from providers with lead agencies. This will:
- confirm notifications of protection concerns about a person using a service that we receive
- generate corresponding AP1/CP1s to lead agencies
- strengthen how we track the outcome of each child or adult protection referral passed to the lead agency.
This new process strengthens our supporting protection role within the social care and social work sector. Our updated notification forms will ensure the accuracy and effectiveness of our follow-up arrangements is improved and reduce unnecessary follow-up enquiries from inspectors to providers and lead agencies.
To support this, we are replacing the current ‘allegation of abuse’ eform with a new ‘protection concern about a person using a service’ eform. The new eform will:
- be accessed through the same system
- include additional core information to make it easier to accurately follow-up with lead agencies to find out the outcome of any subsequent child or adult protection inquiries and investigations.
Key dates and actions
The new eform ‘protection concern about a person using a service’ notification will go live on 7 April 2025.
Providers will have from the 7 April - 5 May 2025 to either complete or withdraw any outstanding allegations of abuse notifications already in progress on the eform system.
After 5 May, this opportunity will expire. Any allegations of abuse notifications still on the eform system will not be accessible and cannot be submitted. Notifications that have been previously submitted will continue to be accessible as read-only.
Our commitment
These changes aim to strengthen and improve information sharing, collaboration and protection approaches, benefitting children and adults at risk of harm.
Need help
We will launch our updated protection procedures and new eforms on 7 April 2025. We will monitor their effectiveness closely.
If you have any questions, you can contact us on 0345 600 9527 Monday to Friday, between 09:00 - 16:00 or you can email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.