South Gloucestershire Council 'learned lessons' from cases

South Gloucestershire social care bosses say they have learned lessons from the reviews

The case of a mother who murdered her husband and a man whose self-neglect was missed by social workers have been reassessed to prevent future tragedies.

South Gloucestershire Council's social care bosses they have learned lessons from both fatal cases.

The cases were subject to statutory review to determine whether agencies could have prevented the two deaths.

The council's health and wellbeing board heard the murder case prompted a child safeguarding practice review.

It was also told the mother of three children under five was convicted of their dad's murder, the Local Democracy Reporting Service said.

Both parents had claimed to be victims of domestic abuse at the hands of the other and it had been difficult to determine who was the perpetrator, a meeting of the board was told.

South Gloucestershire Children's Partnerships business manager Sarah Taylor said the youngsters were on child protection plans because of concerns about the parents' poor mental health, substance misuse and emotional neglect.

"A lot of the learning from Family A was about domestic abuse and thinking about the assumptions that are made when there is domestic abuse about who is the victim and who is the perpetrator," she told the meeting on 7 March.

She said important lessons were also learned from the safeguarding adults review, published in October, into the death of Mr D, a man in his late 50s who died by suicide in 2021.

He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and depression, and was keen to return to Swindon where his family lived, having become increasingly isolated during the pandemic, board members heard.

Ms Taylor said: "There was evidence that he was self neglecting, but those factors weren't really recognised by people working with him at the time.

"Some of the people working with him never saw inside his accommodation and those who did didn't recognise self neglect."

Mr D was "never successfully selected" to have his case heard by a housing panel "and being across two local authority areas meant nobody really grasped that".

Ms Taylor added one of the lessons learned from the review was a multi-agency meeting should have been held to join up the information held by different organisations, further compounded by the fact they spanned two local authority areas.