Managing information and confidentiality

All organisations have to think about how they store and share information as part of safeguarding. However as an infrastructure organisation, your position in your community, and in relation to the local authority may add additional pressures. These are likely to be familiar to you.

• Sharing information. You may be asked by a statutory authority to share information about one of the organisations you support and have to decide if you have the right to do so. Or you may feel you wish to share organisation about a member organisation or someone you are supporting and not be certain if you can or should.
• Confidentiality. You may find that the informal and social networks in the area make it particularly difficult to keep details of any concerns you are aware of confidential.
• Conflicts of interest. Your staff, volunteers and trustees are likely to also be staff, volunteers and trustees at other local organisations. This can create conflicts of interest when deciding what to do about safeguarding concerns you become aware of in those organisations or with specific individuals.
• Storing information. If the people you support are your members, listed in a database, or you keep records of your engagements with other people you must store that information paying attention to data protection. You also need to make sure it is up to date, which can be challenging since contact is not always regular.

The best way to deal with this is to have robust data protection and confidentiality policies and procedures, and check that you comply with them. Alongside these detailed policies, you should make sure that everyone involved with your organisation knows that:

• you should usually only share facts about a person with a third party (person or organisation) if you have recorded consent for those facts to be shared with them
• there are legal exceptions to this, and a number of these relate to safeguarding.

• For more information see our storing and sharing information section in the guide for designated safeguarding leads.
• To learn more about setting up systems for keeping information safe, see data protection and digital technology in our guide for operations managers.