Social Services: Health board-run children's residential centres across the State are employing staff with no qualifications and the care plans the centres are devising for children are very poor, according to a report being published today.
The annual report from the Irish Social Services Inspectorate (ISSI) also expresses concern about health and safety standards in many centres.
"While a majority of centres had safety statements, inspectors were seriously concerned to find that approximately one-third of all inspected centres did not have written confirmation that the premises complied with fire safety standards," the report says.
And while 70 per cent of children in the 32 centres inspected in the period covered by the report had care plans for children in them, the quality of the care plans was variable.
Ms Michele Clarke, chief inspector of the ISSI, said yesterday "very few" care plans were of a high quality.
"Care plans are essential as children need to know what is happening to them and everybody involved in the child's life needs to be agreed on what the plan is in order to make it happen," she said.
She added that half the staff in the centres inspected were on temporary contracts and close to half the managers were in acting positions.
Staff needed to be in full-time posts to provide stability for children, she said.
More than 10 per cent of the children in the centres inspected had no social worker and in just two centres were all staff properly vetted.
The report also draws attention yet again to the difficulties experienced by some young people in care accessing child psychiatric services.
"There are very few adolescent in-patient beds available and in their absence a small number of adolescents with serious psychiatric difficulties are cared for within the childcare rather than the psychiatric services," the report says.
Meanwhile, following reports earlier in the year that children in residential care were being overly prescribed medication for emotional and behavioural problems - allegedly due to the fact that they were being cared for by inadequately trained staff - the ISSI conducted a national survey of the numbers of children in care on medication for mental health problems.
Questionnaires were sent to all 138 centres in the State and the response rate was 96 per cent. There were 549 children and young people living in the centres surveyed and it found 8.7 per cent of them were taking prescribed medication for a mental health problem. Ms Clarke said this level was within "international norms" and all the medication had been prescribed and reviewed.
Ms Clarke, however, expressed concern at the number of very young children spending long periods in residential centres.While health boards regularly claim to have difficulty finding foster parents, Ms Clarke said a separate audit of fostering in three community care areas of Roscommon, West Cork and in the East Coast Area Health Board region found there were more foster carers than children requiring fostering. But all had difficulties getting foster parents for adolescents or siblings.
This audit also found that while many children who were fostered were placed with relatives, in 44 per cent of cases these relatives had not been formally assessed first by the health board to determine their suitability.
Overall there were approximately 4,500 children in the care of health boards in 2003, with the eastern region having the highest proportion of children in care at 47 per 10,000 compared to the west where the figure was 25 per 10,000.