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HIQA report reveals some children waiting years to be allocated a social worker in Cork

A new HIQA report has revealed that children in Cork have been waiting years to be allocated a so...
Newstalk
Newstalk

11.50 24 Mar 2015


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HIQA report reveals some child...

HIQA report reveals some children waiting years to be allocated a social worker in Cork

Newstalk
Newstalk

11.50 24 Mar 2015


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A new HIQA report has revealed that children in Cork have been waiting years to be allocated a social worker. Some of the cases reported were deemed to involve children with "highly complex and acute needs".

The findings are from a full inspection of services in the county from October of last year.

According to the report, "the service was not sufficiently resourced to deliver a child-centred, safe and effective service that met the needs of children and families."

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In this inspection, the report revealed that the Authority found of the 27 standards assessed, the service met six standards required improvement in 19 standards while significant risks were identified in two standards.

Although once children were assigned a social worker the situation improved, the report found that "the effectiveness of the service was compromised due to the length of time it took for a social worker to be allocated to assess the needs of children and families and children could remain at risk while they waited for an assessment."

The findings also stated that "during the inspection, 21 children in one office were awaiting allocation to a social worker following their initial assessment. This was concerning as these children had been determined by the duty social worker as having highly complex and acute needs, which was the highest threshold of need that could be applied."

The longest a child had been waiting for a social worker to be allocated was since 2010 while most of the others had been waiting since 2013. Some of the children who had not been allocated a social worker were found to have a "high level of need".

On top of this, "where allegations of retrospective abuse were made against adults, the service had not established the risks to all children who may have contact with these persons."

Two immediate risks were identified in relation to the safety and effectiveness of the service:

  • children who were deemed to have a high level of need and who were at risk did not all have an allocated social worker or timely access to child protection and welfare interventions.
  • not all retrospective disclosures were managed in line with Children First and national policy.

You can read the report in full here.

This afternoon, Kieran McGrath spoke to Lunchtime with Jonathan Healy and stated that the report was "damning" and not exclusive to Cork

He also went on to say that a great amount of social care work involves waiting around courts for particular cases.

Jonathan asked whether children are worse off under Tusla than HSE, to which Mr McGrath replied: "I would think the practice we have today is inferior to how it was in the past.

"The expectations and pressures that are put on people currently are vastly different to how there were in my time.

"We have made the lives of child protection staff much more difficult and, I think, unnecessarily." 


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