Best Of

Why do you have to report non-emergencies?
Mostly legal reasons - there's some new legislation coming into effect now which puts more responsibility on institutions (like us) to report more safeguarding concerns.

The field of safeguarding has also moved on quite a bit from where our confidentiality policy was previously, so there's some wider change in our sector too.

Does this mean The Mix will report things more lightly?
Not necessarily. It's a funny one - there will probably be more situations where we escalate something as a non-emergency, but less situations where we escalate as an emergency.

So the total number of reports we make will likely go up, but the number of emergencies should go down.

Is your policy the same as Shout's now?
Yes, Shout and The Mix now operate under one policy.

Does this only apply to things posted after the merger?
Yes, that's correct.

There are a couple of reasons for that. 1) there's simply no way we could go through old posts, and 2) the information and safeguarding risk presented in old posts would be out of date.

When we're conducting risk assessments, we need the information we're using to be new and current for it to be a useful process for the person involved.

What happens in a non emergency? Will it just take police longer to come out?
So, there are a huge number of possibilities and it depends on the services involved. The honest answer is we don't know - and they may not tell us what they decide to do.

Our role in that situation is to pass the information on to the services involved, and they don't always keep us informed on what decisions they make with that information.

It might be that the police just keep that information on file in case more reports come in in the future, it may be that someone reaches out to you (like your social worker), it may be that someone comes out to you in person. I realise that's quite vague, though!

The key thing is that we'll always be transparent about our actions with you, and we'll communicate any information we have at the time.

Are there any non-emergency situations that apply to adults?
If someone is an adult (not an adult at risk of harm) there are no instances where we would escalate something as a non-emergency. The only time we weigh in with that age group is when there is an immediate threat to life involved - a bit like our old policy.