Hiqa finds failure to act for at-risk children

Serious risks to children remained at a Tusla Midlands service a year after it was excoriated for not knowing if it had acted on 900 cases of at-risk children notified to it by gardaí.

The ongoing risks were identified in January and March this year by inspectors from the Health Information and Quality Authority (Hiqa) and included:

• Failure to allocate a social worker to a number of high priority cases, including adult retrospective cases which were known to the department for a number of years;
• One duty team was run predominantly by agency staff with less than two years experience and no direct line manager;
• Just one of 27 standards assessed was met;
• One in five of 53 cases sampled was escalated by Hiqa for review due to lack of timely or appropriate action by Tusla.