How Kevin Bacon can help us promote this year’s Safeguarding Adults Awareness Week

Estimated reading time 6 minutes.

Although November feels quite someway off, it will be here in no time. So, 'what is important about November?' you may ask.

November is when the national Safeguarding Adults Week takes place. Coordinated by the Ann Craft Trust (ACT), the week is a time for organisations to come together to raise awareness of important safeguarding issues. The first awareness week was held in 2018 and the event has continued to pick up momentum ever since. It is now supported by a good number of safeguarding adults boards, including Norfolk. With an overarching theme each year, ACT offer a different safeguarding theme each day. The themes encourage us to consider how we can work together to establish safer cultures within our workplaces and communities.

It goes without saying that raising awareness about adult safeguarding is something that NSAB and all other SABs do all the time, but think of the week rather as a way to focus our voices – like a magnifying glass focuses sunlight:

‘the louder the echo, the greater the impact’, as one SAB manager described it to me.

This year’s week runs from Monday 18th – Friday 22nd November. It’s a good three months away, but it will be here in the blink of an eye, given how much is happening in adult safeguarding.

The overall focus for 2024 is ‘Working in Partnership’, with the following daily themes:

Monday 18th	Look, Listen, Ask – Developing Professional Curiosity
Tuesday 19th	Working in partnership: How to work effectively with the people you support
Wednesday 20th	Establishing Professional Boundaries
Thursday 21st	Recognising exploitation: The ladder of criminality (Criminal Exploitation)
Friday 22nd	Professional and Organisational Learning

NSAB is planning a number of events during the week, including

• one on the Monday (professional curiosity);
• a webinar by Paul Nicholls, the author of SAR S, on the Thursday;
• and ‘In Conversation with’ … Professor Michael Preston-Shoot on professional and organisational learning on the Friday.

Excitingly, the community safety team at the Office of the Police and Commissioner for Norfolk and the police may be offering some events too, but to be confirmed.

What has Kevin Bacon got to do with the awareness week?

Safeguarding adults is and must be based on a collaborative approach, between us and the individual we are concerned about, between people in different roles, and between colleagues across different sectors. It’s all about relationships. A very experienced colleague said to me, when I first started working in adult safeguarding:

‘if you are doing safeguarding on your own, you are doing it wrong’

It’s a phrase I have never forgotten. It underlines the critical feature of good safeguarding practice, which is built on collective responsibility and collaborative relationships.

This point was recently explored in a very interesting NHS Horizons blog by Kyla Avis, Marc Harris, Tanya Verrall and Zoe Lord: Why Relationship Building is Fundamental to Health System Improvement – NHS Horizons (horizonsnhs.com).

Kyla and colleagues write that deliberate collaboration and strong relationships are fundamental to improving the ways complex systems operate and the outcomes they produce. While this blog is looking at health improvement, it can be applied equally to adult safeguarding.

In a recent study conducted by the Warwick Business School (UK), which investigated the Virginia Mason Medical Centre and the NHS Systems in their sustained improvement journey, researchers identified six key lessons. The researchers concluded that:

“In quality improvement, relationships are not a priority, they are a prerequisite.”

Switch the ‘quality improvement’ for adult safeguarding in this quote:

“In adult safeguarding, relationships are not a priority, they are a prerequisite.”

The Warwick Business School study generated five key insights into the importance of relationships (read the five key insights here)

Back to Kevin Bacon, how connected are we all really? Much more than we think.

A fun game to play with film-loving friends is Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon – that is, to find the shortest path between any given actor and Footloose movie star Kevin Bacon.

Here’s an example, starting with Taylor Swift, who has appeared in a few television shows and movies during her superstar career:

1.    Taylor Swift first appeared in the 2009 movie, Hannah Montana

2.    The Movie, which also starred the actor, Lucas Till

3.    Both Lucas Till and Kevin Bacon appeared in the 2011 movie, X-Men: First Class.

Another example, connect George Clooney to Kevin Bacon:

1.    George Clooney was in Ocean's Eleven with Matt Damon

2.    Matt Damon was in The Departed with Jack Nicholson, and

3.    Jack Nicholson was in A Few Good Men with Kevin Bacon.

The theory is that anyone in the world is only six or fewer ‘friends of friends’ away from anyone else in the world.

It was originally described by a Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy, in his 1929 short story Chains. Since then, this idea has inspired a stage play, a film and a book – Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. In 2007, Bacon himself set up SixDegrees.org, recognising the popularity of the ‘small world’ phenomenon and helping raise money for charity in the United States.

Six degrees has also been linked with work of the Stanley Milgram, the American social psychologist. Milgram examined the average path length for social networks of people in the United States and was ground breaking in that it suggested that human society is a small-world-type network characterised by short path-lengths.  The experiments are often associated with “six degrees of separation”, although Milgram did not use this term himself. See It’s a small world! (stories from a connected world).

If we really have at the most only 6 steps between us all, let’s use it to spread the word about Safeguarding Adults Week (Monday 18th to Friday 22nd November)!

With the advent of Facebook etc, we’re now typically down to 4 degrees of separation, but in Norfolk, surely we’re only 2 or 3 connections away from anyone else in the county?

So, let’s try this: tell someone who you wouldn’t normally talk to about Safeguarding Adults Week in the course of your working day.

In essence, the ask here is for you to make use of your SARN (your ‘safeguarding adults relationships network’) to tell people about the awareness week.

Say you mention it to your hairdresser. They tell their next client who works at Aviva. The person at Aviva plays in a darts team and that evening the team has an away match in south Norfolk. Here they tell a member of the opposition team, who also plays in the village football team. That weekend he tells the match referee about Safeguarding Adults Week. The referee is the postman who delivers your post and asks if you have heard about this ‘awareness week for safeguarding adults’

Job done!

Together we can spread the word about Safeguarding Adults Week in 6 degrees (or probably far fewer)!

Walter Lloyd-Smith
Norfolk Safeguarding Adults Board Manager