A stark regional divide in out-of-hours child protection services remains with concerns over placing children in unregulated emergency placements overnight, according to a new inspection report.
The Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) carried out an inspection of child protection and welfare service provided by the National Out of Hours Service operated by the Child and Family Agency (Tusla).
The out of hours emergency child protection and welfare service steps in when Tusla’s local network child protection and welfare services are closed at evenings, overnight and weekends.
Hiqa inspected the service between March 24 and April 2 and found a range of failings.
The inspection report found children in Dublin can receive face-to-face intervention from social workers during emergencies, while most children across the country rely on gardaí and telephone-based support.
“Children supported by on-call social workers faced delays in receiving a service and had limited in-person contact with a social worker,” the report said.
“The service was not adequately resourced with sufficient emergency care placements for children, and it continued to routinely place children in inappropriate, unregulated care arrangements with agency staff overnight.
“The system in place for ensuring timely safeguarding checks of agency staff out of hours required improvement.”
Registration of agency workers, including verification of garda vetting, is carried out by Tusla’s National Central Compliance Unit.
A risk control has been placed on the national services risk register to address the risks associated with these arrangements.
The review found that the agency provider had nevertheless failed to ensure that NOHS staff could access information held by the Compliance Unit overnight.
As a result, staff working through the night could not complete identification and safeguarding checks in the same way as they could during normal working hours.
The inspection report said while in most cases children who were deemed to be especially vulnerable were identified and responded to, in some cases, the immediate safety plans for these children did not always consider the risks of exploitation or organised abuse.
It made repeated and ongoing use of Immediate Place of Safety supervised hotel rooms for children out of hours, which placed these children at increased risk of being targeted for exploitation and organised abuse.
The service did not have an effective system in place to monitor and track children who went missing from care out of hours.
Following the inspection, management submitted a satisfactory compliance plan to HIQA, which outlined plans to address the issues identified during the inspection.