State risks being sued over out-of-hours social care
Internal Department of Health correspondence seen by the Irish Examiner strongly advises that failure to provide such services carries major risks.
Specifically, the correspondence warns :
* “Children and familiesin crisis will not have anywhere to turn to in emergencies.”
* “Minister and Health Service Executive [HSE] will continue to be blamed when adverse events occur.”
* “Possible exposure tolegal action where State fails in its duty to care for children.”
Last year, this paper revealed how a troubled 15-year-old ended up sleeping in a Garda station overnight because officers were unable to contact HSE social workers. The HSE denied responsibility for the child’s care after 5pm, saying community-based social services were only provided in working hours.
The incident drew attention to the lack of out-of-hours social services for children, an issue of which the department was already well aware.
A memo prepared by the department’s Child Welfare and Protection Policy Unit warned that one of the major risks the department faced was the failure to provide out-of-hours services. The likelihood of the risk being realised was seen as “unavoidable” and officials in the unit warned the impact would be “extremely detrimental”.
Two of the reasons for the difficulty in establishing such a system were the “likely industrial relations difficulties with HSE staff” and the fact that necessary resources were “not currently available”, the officials said.
Despite the possible consequences, the department is not going to establish out-of-hours social services.
Instead, the HSE is arranging for a system whereby gardaí needing to house at-risk children outside of working hours will be able to contact foster families.
“Foster families are currently being recruited with a view to commencing the service on or before June 1, 2009,” a spokesperson for Children’s Minister Barry Andrews said this weekend.
In a speech this month, Mr Andrews said such a service “does not purport to be an out-of-hours social work service” but was “another building block towards the development of an out-of-hours infrastructure”.
His spokesperson added this weekend that, “instead of developing a stand-alone social work out-of-hours service”, it had been agreed to develop alternative proposals based on a more integrated approach.
This would mean persons seeking social services could access out-of-hours services provided by the HSE in other areas, such as “GPs, acute hospital services and mental health services”.
