Serious risks found in child protection service in Midlands

High priority child protection cases in the Midlands, that were not allocated to social workers, were known about "for years" by services, according to a report by the Health Information and Quality Authority.

Hiqa has said it identified serious risks in the Midlands child protection and welfare services, which covers Laois, Offaly, Westmeath and Longford, including one team predominantly made up of agency social workers with two years or less experience.

The team had no direct line manager and a principal social worker who was due to leave in January. The matter was subsequently rectified by Tusla, the Child and Family Agency.

Inspections of the Midlands services were carried out by Hiqa in January and March. They followed concerns about services after hundreds of unallocated child protection case files, for Laois and Offaly, were found in a Portlaoise office.

When inspections commenced, Hiqa inspectors found a fifth of 53 child protection cases sampled by them, had to be escalated to the duty intake principal social worker for review, because of concerns about the prioritisation they were assigned, or because of a lack of timeliness or appropriate action.

And inspectors identified a small number of children in care who did not have an allocated social worker for extended periods ranging from two to nine years.

A number of these children had not received a social worker visit for a prolonged period, for example, over three years.

“If there was no referral made to the duty system regarding these children, then contacts such as safeguarding visits were not made,” the report said.

“This presented a significant risk … overall, inspectors found that the level of social work monitoring of the unallocated cases was not acceptable.”

Inspectors also found interagency links were not consistently in place and there were gaps in inter-professional contact in unallocated cases.

“It was not always clear how staff communicated the outcome of their assessment of notifications of An Garda Síochána,” it said.

In the reports, published by the authority, it said of 27 standards, required of a child protection service, one was met, 22 required improvement and four standards were seen as “a significant risk”.

These risks included that the national policy Children First was not consistently implemented and information systems in place to support the delivery of the service were “not fit for purpose”.

The authority found overall, once children were allocated to a member of staff in the service, the majority of children and their families received an adequate service. However, children experienced delays in being allocated to a social worker and in their needs being assessed.

Responding to the reports, Tusla said significant progress had been made throughout the child protection and welfare services over the last 12 months.

Jim Gibson, chief operations officer, said Tusla was committed to improving child protection and welfare services and will continue to build on the significant progress that has been made in the past 12 months.

“ A range of measures have been implemented, including strengthening the management structure, allocating additional staff to reduce backlogs and activating a robust action plan to address key areas for improvement,” he said.