Abstract

Adult safeguarding in social work is often framed in terms of responding to risk, harm, and abuse. However, contemporary practice and policy increasingly emphasises the proactive and preventative approaches that centre the lived experience of those being safeguarded. This requires moving beyond process-driven interventions to approaches that are person-centred, outcomes-focused, and co-produced, as advocated in Making Safeguarding Personal (UK). Safety is a central concern within adult safeguarding, yet, there is limited research which explores what this concept means to older people, despite safeguarding guidance encouraging practitioners to work with adults to define safety on their own terms.

This presentation reports on a qualitative, arts-based study that brought together older people with care and support needs (n=27) and a multi-disciplinary team to explore meanings of safety and strategies for navigating it in later life. The research explicitly aimed to bridge the gap between academic inquiry and social work practice by employing a co-creation methodology, encouraging participants as active knowledge producers, rather than passive subjects. In this way it also addresses the conference theme, linking research and practice.

Four workshop groups met twice for 2.5 hours of creative sessions, followed by a semi-structured telephone interview six weeks later. The workshops contained metaphor-based discussion, visual arts, and collaborative poetry to elicit rich, multi-modal expressions of safety. This approach enabled participants to articulate nuanced understandings of safety that may have been difficult to capture through conventional methods. Data included field notes, artworks, poems and interview transcripts, all thematically analysed using an iterative process.

Three key themes were identified: 1) Redefining agency with a changing self, 2) Redefining agency in a changing world, and 3) Negotiating safety in place. The participants’ insights challenge deficit-based narratives of ageing, reframing older people as active agents who deploy sophisticated safety strategies in relational, physical, and societal contexts. Importantly, safety was not solely about the absence of harm; it was relational, built through trust, familiarity, autonomy, and connection to community.

The co-creation process demonstrated how participatory, arts-based methods can generate actionable knowledge for social work practice. First, it revealed the everyday, strategic, risk management undertaken by older people: knowledge which should inform safeguarding assessments, care planning, and community safety initiatives. Secondly, it underscored the need for practitioners and policy-makers to respect and build on older people’s own definitions and strategies for safety, rather than imposing externally constructed risk frameworks. Thirdly, it highlighted the importance of fostering relational trust and community connectedness as integral components of safeguarding.

This presentation will report on the key findings and implications of this research, as well as providing reflections and insights regarding how the collaborative approach produced findings directly relevant to social work practice and empowered older people who may be most affected by safeguarding interventions to shape the knowledge base that guides them. The findings reported in this presentation are part of a larger NIHR funded project exploring adult safeguarding with older people.