merrion street

Minister Zappone today welcomed the findings of the Health Information and Quality Authority’s 2015 overview report of their independent inspections of Tusla run children’s services. The report stated that, overall, there was good social work practice with children and families in foster care and the child welfare and protections services. HIQA identified that Tusla needed more social workers and needed to increase standardisation of services around the country to ensure that all children received an equitable provision of service. The report also noted the need for continuing development of national policies and ICT projects.

Minister Zappone commented:
“We have, quite rightly, set high standards for children’s services and Tusla strives to meet these every day. HIQA plays a very important role in inspecting children’s services and monitoring standards for a safe and effective service for children.”

HIQA identified a shortage of social workers across many inspections and Minister Zappone said that the level of funding provided to Tusla for 2016 has significantly strengthened Tusla’s capacity to recruit more social workers and to deliver a high level of care for children.

The Government has provided Tusla with funding of over €676 million in 2016 - this is an increase of €38 million on the provision for 2015 and was widely acknowledged as representing a significant strengthening of Tusla’s base funding level. The additional resources provided gives the Agency greater capacity to respond to identified risk and to address areas of unmet need.

The Minister welcomed that inspections found that staff responded to the needs of children and focussed on their rights and welfare. Children were encouraged to take part in decisions on their care, had access to advocates and were helped to keep positive attachments with their families. Children told inspectors that their lives had improved through contact with child protection social workers.

Tusla will continue to work very hard for the rest of this year to recruit the social work and social care staff to support families and to protect vulnerable children. The Minister noted that the majority of HIQA findings relate to standards that are deemed to require improvement. Tusla reports to the Minister on the action plans that they have put in place following each of the inspections to deal with problems and areas needing quality improvement.

Minister Zappone welcomed the fact that an improvement programme was put in place last year in the Louth/Meath area to deal with the significant issues reported in that inspection. Minister Zappone will be seeking an update from the CEO of Tusla on the improvements and an assurance of good progress. The Minister noted that Tusla reported to her last week that 99% of children who are listed on the Child Protection Notification System have an allocated social worker. The remaining 1% (18) of children are supervised by a social worker on the duty team while undergoing assessment as some of them will only have become known to Tusla in recent days as emergency referrals. They will be transferred to an allocated social worker as a priority.

Tusla has been reforming the provision of its services to ensure that a consistent quality is available across the country. Minister Zappone is confident that this process and the major recruitment campaign currently underway, will see a significant improvement in all child welfare and protection services.