Children alleging sexual assaults in one of State’s poorest areas waiting over a year for social worker assessments

Children alleging sexual assaults in one of the poorest areas of the State are continuing to wait over a year for initial social worker assessments.

The wait comes despite repeated warnings by the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) to child and family agency Tusla about “chronic” under-resourcing in the region.

The findings are contained in a Hiqa report on child protection services in the region, published on Wednesday. The inspection, conducted between April 3rd and 6th, 2023, focuses on management of referrals, from initial referral to assessment by a social worker.

A Tusla child protection manager in the Dublin South West/West Wicklow/Kildare region told Hiqa inspectors in April that staff were “firefighting” and “robbing Peter to pay Paul” as they attempted to allocate insufficient staff resources between children in care and those awaiting allocation of a social worker.

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The nine months prior to the inspection “had been the most challenging period [the area’s service] had experienced”, the manager said.

The area, which has the third-highest levels of deprivation across Tusla’s 17 regions, has been an “area of concern” to Hiqa since 2019. Its proportion of unallocated cases has steadily increased, reaching 42.5 per cent by the third quarter of 2022.

It was inspected annually since 2019, with ongoing high levels of noncompliance in areas including governance, service delivery and timely response to children at risk. A warning letter was issued to the service area in January 2023.

In February Hiqa wrote to the Department of Children outlining its concerns and the following month, Hiqa decided to inspect the service again.

“At the time of the inspection the area was carrying a large number of vacancies across all pillars – child protection and welfare, intake and assessment, children in care, fostering, aftercare and business support teams. The number of whole time equivalent (WTE) vacancies totalled 53.74,” said the report. “There was a chronic shortfall in resources to meet the demands”.

A review of files found a four-year-old who had alleged inappropriate contact by an older child still had not been seen by a social worker five months later. “Given the age of this child, their ability to recount the incident months later may not be reliable,” noted the report.

“A teenager who alleged sexual assault 14 months ago was still on a waiting list. Another teenager who also alleged sexual assault eight months ago remained on the wait-list with no direction to support services evidenced on file,” it said.

In another case, “children under the age of eight were referred because they were found home alone. The case was on a waiting list for four months.

[ Tusla fails to meet standards for caring for unaccompanied child asylum seekers - Hiqa ]

“While attempts were made to contact the family these were not successful. This was brought to the attention of the area during the inspection, however they were unable to determine if the children were still residing at the address provided. These children therefore may have moved to another area, and the risks to them remained unassessed and unaddressed,” said the Hiqa report.

“Management systems at all levels could not ensure that all children and families received a timely service and could not provide adequate assurances of the safety of the service.”

In addition to child protection and welfare risks, the impact of the wait time for preliminary enquiries was that notifications to An Garda Síochána about suspected abuse or welfare concerns were sometimes delayed.

“There were five cases, of the cases inspectors sampled, which identified the need to notify the gardaí. The average time since referral for these cases was four months,” said the report.

Where there was “immediate” risk to children, they received a timely response. However, those in medium or low-risk situations “often experienced unacceptable levels of delay”.

This meant “the true nature of the risk was often unknown”, the report said, adding that the main obstacle to addressing this was lack of resources. The service was non-compliant with all three standards inspected.

Tusla outlined steps in an appendix to the report on how it will address the failings.

In response to the report, Minister for Children Roderic O’Gorman has said he is concerned at the shortage of social workers which he acknowledged has led to delays in assessments and growing waiting lists.

Mr O’Gorman said that the fact that any children were awaiting a significant period of time was a concern and his Department was engaging with social workers in that area.

“We have a very significant problem in terms of the recruitment of social workers. There is a real pressure there right now. We’ve about 1,600 social workers across Tusla and we are having difficulties in terms of recruitment and retention,” he said.

Mr O’Gorman said the report did find that those children who were in most urgent need were seen within the requisite time in terms of their assessment.

“Nevertheless, additional social workers have been put in place now to deal with both the intake of new cases and also new team leads have been put in place as well to provide greater levels of coverage in terms of social work.

Mr O’Gorman added that there are additional social workers being hired through the graduate entry programmes and through social workers from abroad.