Drumm: Health board system may have been better

THE chief executive of the HSE said yesterday there were questions over whether the HSE was better now than it was five years ago, as it emerged the executive does not have a series of records in relation to children in care.

Speaking before the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) yesterday Professor Brendan Drumm said that although, in an ideal world, the issue of child protection should be dealt with in an integrated system, if it were taken out of the realm of the HSE there would be “100% focus on it” and no competing interests.

He said: “I think maybe what we need is a review of what our HSE structure is. Has it delivered anything above what the older system did? Is it a better structure? Does it have faults?”

Questioning whether the HSE was now delivering a better service than the old health board system abolished five years ago, he said that now might be an opportunity to consider if the organisation has reached a point where questions in relation to whether or not it should be providing child protection services need to be answered.

He also said the HSE had to live within its budget and accepted that “we are struggling to actually adequately deal with that 10%” of cases regarding child welfare concerns which come to the attention of social services.

The PAC heard that:

* There was no central data collection system for child deaths.

* There are up to 500 fewer social workers here compared with the North.

* Social workers here are unevenly dispersed.

* Industrial relations issues have slowed the passing-on of information.

* Most recent information regarding children in foster care dates from last November.

* There are no figures regarding children in care who have been victims of a serious assault, attempted suicide, or developed a drug dependency.

HSE national director Laverne McGuinness said there was no central repository for data, including up to this point, data on child deaths, and that collating it had been a manual task.

She said the HSE was now moving towards a more comprehensive, centralised way of collating the information, and that the computerised system “should be up and running in a month or so”.

The HSE came in for heavy criticism from members of the PAC, with Labour Deputy Roisín Shortall claiming that it “beggars belief” that there was no centralised data collection system, and that arguments over the in-camera rule blocking the passing on of files was “a smokescreen”.

“I am quickly coming to the view that the HSE in incapable of providing child protection services,” she said, adding that the onus was now on the government to decide if the HSE was best placed to cater for children’s needs.