Vulnerable Adults.
Carrickfergus Junior Gateway is committed to practice which protects vulnerable adults from harm. All volunteers in this organisation accept and recognise our responsibilities to develop awareness of the issues which cause vulnerable adults from harm.
We will endeavour to safeguard vulnerable adults by:
- Adopting procedures that will protect vulnerable adults from harm.
- Adopting vulnerable adult protection guidelines through a code of behaviour for volunteers.
- Sharing information about vulnerable adult protection and good practice with members, parents and volunteers.
- Sharing information about concerns with agencies who need to know, and involving vulnerable adults and their families/carers appropriately.
- Providing effective management for staff and volunteers through supervision, support and training.
We are also committed to reviewing our policy and practice at regular intervals.
As a junior club our focus is on protecting children and this is done by continually training volunteers and reviewing our procedure for working with children. Despite this we feel that it is necessary to have a policy and procedure in place should the situation arise in which we felt a vulnerable adult needed protected.
To protect vulnerable adults our procedure is:
- Stage 1
- To ensure that all of our volunteers have had an Access NI check done, this provides us with information about a person’s spent and unspent criminal convictions.
- Stage 2
- Alongside the Access NI checks we ask all volunteers to provide us with 2 references of people who have known them for a minimum of two years.
- Stage 3
- As a club we also have a code of behaviour which is a group of rules and regulations that we expect our volunteers to abide by in relation to protecting vulnerable adults and children.
- Stage 4
- We as a club alongside our associated agencies, NEELB and Mencap provide training annually helping volunteers recognise a vulnerable adult and also the best strategies that can be used to protect the person from harm.
- Stage 5
- If any volunteer has concerns about a vulnerable adult we ask them to discuss it with the leader in charge. The leader in charge will then inform the relevant authorities.