THE HEALTH Service Executive (HSE) is facing renewed pressure over child protection services after new details emerged of how another teenager died while in State care.
William Colquhoun was admitted into the HSE’s system of emergency care at the age of 16 after running away from home in Co Kildare. Within two years, and after a succession of different care placements and social workers, he died of a drug overdose.
Care workers familiar with his case say there were missed opportunities to provide him with a care plan and that more supportive forms of care were never made available.
A spokeswoman for the HSE was last night unable to confirm if Mr Colquhoun’s death was included among the 23 deaths of children in care which it says have occurred over the past decade.
Care professionals said yesterday that his death is not among those recorded by health authorities and they are not aware of any case review which occurred following his death.
Yesterday his mother, Eunice Colquhoun, called for an inquiry into the HSE’s handling of the case.
“I feel let down,” she said. “It was the wrong system. There was never enough support for him. There weren’t the people around to control his behaviour. He just got worse and worse. He went off the rails. No one seemed to do anything.”
William Colquhoun died at the age of 18 on July 20th, 2008. He was still in receipt of an after-care service funded by the HSE. The allegations over lapses in care and mishandling of his case are similar to the findings contained in an independent report on the death of Tracey Fay.
The report, published in The Irish Times last year, was strongly critical of health authorities for their “chaotic” provision of care services and highlighted many “missed opportunities” when the State should have intervened in Ms Fay’s lifetime.
Speaking yesterday, Minister for Children Barry Andrews said there have been “drastic” improvements to the care system since the death of Ms Fay but that vulnerable children will always face a level of risk.
“We cannot guarantee that, with the chaotic background and challenging behaviour of some of these children, there will not be unfortunate incidents in the future.” He said it was impossible to give such guarantees “short of locking them up”.
The Colquhoun case, meanwhile, is likely to put a renewed focus on the emergency “out of hours” hostel system in Dublin, which has been linked to a number of deaths of vulnerable children in care.
There is also anger at how Mr Colquhoun’s funeral arrangements were handled. He had been in the care of Rainbow Community Services, a private care provider which received €7,500 a week from the HSE. Care workers say staff at the centre were forced to raise money themselves to pay for his funeral. Rainbow Community Services did not return calls from The Irish Times.