The decision of the Eastern Health Board to accommodate healthy children in hospital wards while they wait for foster care or residential places is, at the very least, questionable. It is easy enough to imagine the distress to a child of being removed from the family home and of finding himself or herself in the alien surroundings of a hospital ward. What must be the effect on the child of remaining in this situation for days, weeks or months, perhaps going to school in the hospital, playing in a hospital playroom, living, sleeping and waking in a hospital ward, with nobody to turn to for attention but busy hospital staff?
Social workers in Dublin's children's hospitals talk of some children withdrawing into themselves, of others becoming aggressive, of toddlers regressing to a baby stage. When a sick child is due to go to hospital, the parents will usually do everything they can to prepare the child for the experience. Very often a parent will remain with the child some or all of the time, and the child is discharged from the hospital as quickly as possible. The healthy child, in hospital because there is no fostering or residential place available, has none of these comforts. How much worse must be the situation of children placed in adult hospitals? That this can happen was confirmed this week by the EHB's child care manager, Mr Paul Harrison, though Mr Harrison says it is a rare occurrence. The danger must be, however, that as the children's hospitals become increasingly resistant to accepting children who are not sick, the board's adult hospitals, such as Loughlinstown, Cherry Orchard and James Connolly Memorial Hospital will be used for this purpose.
What is to be done? The Eastern Health Board has promised three measures to tackle the problem. The first is the opening (next Monday) of a 10-bed emergency home for children under 12 years old. The second is a scheme in which foster families will take children on an emergency basis at weekends and at night; this is being negotiated with unions representing EHB workers. The third is the provision of a social work service outside normal hours and this too is being negotiated with the unions.
These measures will make a difference if they are implemented with some degree of urgency. But the demand on the EHB's child care services is such that there is a danger that the new services could clog up quickly with children waiting for long-term places. This highlights the importance of working with families so as to reduce the number of children coming into care in the first place. Recently the EHB published a report on its Family Support Service which is low-cost and involves part-time workers helping families whose children might otherwise go into care. The service has shown itself to work effectively, possibly because families see the workers as non-professionals and are more willing to co-operate with them. An expansion of this service should be included in any plan aimed at ending the admission of healthy children to hospital.