MORE THAN 900 children in the care of the Health Service Executive do not have an allocated social worker, new figures show.
While there are 5,529 children in care, just 4,623 or 83.6 per cent of them have an allocated social worker. The data, which reflects the position at the end of March, was provided to a recent meeting of the HSE board.
The figures show the situation is worst in the Dublin/North East region, where 30 per cent of children in care do not have an allocated social worker. But in the West, just 4.5 per cent of children in care do not have an allocated social worker.
The majority of these children in care are with foster families.
At the launch of the HSE’s annual report for 2008 yesterday, the head of the HSE Prof Brendan Drumm, admitted it did not have sufficient social workers.
Asked how confident he was that the 5,000-plus children in care at the end of last year were being well cared for given the shortage of social workers, Prof Drumm indicated the real concern was the numbers of reports of at-risk children in the community for whom social workers could not be allocated .
“I am not so much concerned about that group [those in care] as about the massively growing demand for people reporting cases of child welfare or child abuse cases. That is something we are likely to see continuing to grow and to be a huge challenge for us,” he said.
The Irish Times reported earlier this month that about 21,000 reports of children at risk were made to health authorities last year, but one-third of these were not allocated to social workers.
And a HSE report published earlier this week showed it received 23,268 reports relating to child abuse, neglect and child welfare concerns in 2007 and that there was an initial assessment undertaken in respect of 15,074 of them. Fine Gael’s Alan Shatter questioned why no initial assessment was undertaken in relation to the other 8,194 reports received.
Prof Drumm said all cases would have been triaged and then prioritised, but he warned only 10 per cent of abuse cases were being reported to the HSE, so it was only seeing the tip of the iceberg.
He added that the HSE planned to appoint an additional 60-70 social workers this year and to standardise the manner in which allegations of abuse or neglect were handled by social workers.
“We are appointing more social workers, we are standardising how the system deals with these requests, but it’s not something that I can give you any reassurance by saying that I’m happy. It’s a continuous challenge,” he said.
He added that only 10 per cent of abuse cases would actually come to the attention of the HSE.
Later on the News at One on RTÉ, he said he would be “surprised” if the HSE received funding for an out of hours social work service in the current economic climate. The lack of such a service has been criticised several times, most recently in the report into the deaths of the Dunne family in Monageer, Co Wexford.
The service would cost €20 million annually. Instead of it “places of safety” can be accessed for children out of hours through the Garda or GP co-ops, he said.