HUNDREDS OF children who are reported to be at risk of abuse or neglect are not being adequately assessed by child protection teams who are struggling to cope with heavy caseloads and long waiting lists, it has emerged.
Unpublished reports by child protection teams on the adequacy of child and family services in the Health Service Executive show a series of failings in child protection services across the State.
Among the major flaws identified by social work teams are:
About 1,500 reports of children at risk of abuse or neglect are on waiting lists to be assessed. In some cases, the cases will remain on waiting lists indefinitely unless they escalate into emergency cases.
In Roscommon – where a major inquiry is under way into the handling of last month’s incest case – childcare managers say chronic delays in dealing with referrals are “placing children and the HSE in a vulnerable position”.
Children in care are regularly being inappropriately placed in hospital beds because of a lack of suitable care beds in areas such as Donegal, Longford and Westmeath.
Social work teams in Cork say staff shortages and high numbers of referrals means they are engaged in “fire brigading” and legal action to defend themselves against their ongoing failure to provide proper care for children and their families.
In Waterford gaps in services are widening due to increasing demand and static growth in social work teams.
A failure to comprehensively assess the needs of young people admitted into care in Laois and Offaly is breaching the HSE’s statutory obligations and is an “indictment of our services”, according to childcare managers.
Vulnerable children in south Tipperary, as well as social workers, are being exposed to “unacceptable levels of risk” because of long delays in responding to child welfare or abuse concerns.
The details are contained in unpublished “section 8” reports which the HSE is obliged to produce each year on the adequacy of child and family services which run to almost 1,000 pages in total. These regional reports were used to compile a heavily edited national report on child and family services for 2006, which was published in recent months.
In general, child protection teams reported that most admissions to care were being made on an emergency basis rather than being planned, in contravention of the HSE policy for children at risk.
In response, the HSE says in all cases where there is a serious and immediate risk to the health or welfare of a child, it responds immediately and takes appropriate action.
It adds that the HSE has developed common referral and assessment procedures and will commence implementation of these in a consistent manner.
However, social workers say many of the gaps identified in the report have not been addressed and that the recent recruitment embargo has exacerbated problems even further.
Among the other major gaps outlined in the report are a lack of an out-of-hours social work services for emergency cases and a lack of specialised residential places for children at risk with challenging behaviour.
Groups such as Barnardos say there is too much emphasis on dealing with child protection cases on an emergency basis. Its chief executive Fergus Finlay says the State is too often picking up the pieces after the damage is done.