Safe Families are duty-bound to ensure that when children visit a volunteer’s home they are going into a safe environment. For this reason, all volunteers’ homes where a child may visit or overnight hosting may occur must undergo a Home Safety Check (HSC). The HSC is also an opportunity to provide guidance to volunteers around ‘childproofing’ their house. The HSC can be found on the volunteer’s profile under the sidebar option ‘Home Safety Checklists’. It can either be completed online whilst with the volunteer and saved in draft or written up afterwards.
In completing the HSC, CVMs should:
- Exercise professional judgement and common sense; no house will be perfect, but it must be safe.
- Discuss a fire plan with hosts and direct them to the fire brigade website for advice on installing plans on smoke alarms and on carbon monoxide alarms.
- Where there are pets, decide whether some manner of risk assessment or pet management plan would be helpful. If so then this needs to be uploaded to the volunteer’s documents and a note left on approval notes.
- Ensure that the form has been completed fully and that all questions have been answered.
- Ensure that negative or N/A answers are addressed.
- CVMs should then finalise the HSC onto the DB and send it to the volunteer(s) for acceptance (the volunteer will need to have had their DB login detail sent prior to acceptance).
Making and following up recommendations:
- The volunteer(s) must be sent a list of recommendations to complete via the database, with it made clear which are mandatory, and which are recommendations.
- Prior to approval as a Host Home or Family Friend with at-home-care, CVMs must follow up on the list of recommendations, either visiting the house again or by reviewing photos sent by the volunteers. This will need be recorded on the database. Mandatory HSC requirements need to be carried out, evidenced, and noted in approval notes before the volunteers come to panel.
Significant home alterations, moving house and annual renewal:
- When completing the HSC, the CVMs must make it clear to volunteers that if they have home alterations, they must tell Safe Families and they may not use their home for that period. The CVM must ensure the home is recertified afterwards.
- The volunteer will also be asked to renew their HSC annually by confirming that all the information previously recorded about their home is still accurate. The DB will automatically email the volunteer 1 month, 1 week (with the CVM) and on the scheduled renewal date. If the HSC goes beyond the renewal date without the volunteer actioning this, the household will not be able to provide ‘at home’ support until it is renewed.
- At recertification, or if volunteer moves house, a new HSC must be conducted.
There should be a reminder of these policies every year to volunteers and a full HSC carried out after three years, in line with recertification (see section 5 for further information).