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HSE action on childcare still not enough for real impact
18 July 2010
The organisation that represents frontline social workers has disputed a government claim that the provision of 200 extra social workers will help the Health Service Executive to deliver a better system of childcare in the country.
‘‘It is a drop in the ocean," said Ineke Durville, president of the Irish Association of Social Workers (IASW). ‘‘We need to double the number of social workers in the area of childcare and child protection to make a real impact and see serious improvements in care."
Barry Andrews, the Minister for Children, said that the hiring of 200 additional social workers in this area would help the HSE to deliver on its statutory responsibilities.
However, Durville said that only about a quarter of the social workers employed by the state - approximately 700 of 2,700 social workers - worked with children and families.
‘‘We need to admit that there are problems that may not be solved due to the resource shortage.
There needs to be more openness about that.
We should have the minister telling us: ‘Okay, this is what we are going to do until we get the resources’.
‘‘But that is not what we are being told. It is not possible to have a perfect service with such limited resources," she said.
Durville was speaking after the Health Information Quality Authority (Hiqa) published reports that raised serious concerns about the care provided to children in foster care in some Dublin regions. Hiqa reported that foster care services in parts of Dublin were ‘‘in crisis’’.
The Hiqa investigators found senior HSE management were to blame for serious failures in foster care services and called for child protection services to be removed from the HSE.
‘‘The Childcare Act places very clear responsibility for the protection and welfare of children on the HSE.
That responsibility is then delegated to social workers within the HSE.
The difficulty for social workers is that we are trying to do that as much as we can in the absence of adequate resources and staff," said Durville.
She said the latest reports from Hiqa were ‘‘a new departure’’, as they had exposed the inaction of HSE management while vulnerable children were being placed in unsafe and unvetted placements, sometimes for years on end.
In the case of the Dublin North West region, Hiqa said there was ‘‘a lack of recognition at senior management level that the childcare regulations exist to safeguard and protect vulnerable children’’.
In an interview on RTE radio after the reports were published, Andrews said he had told the HSE that staff who failed to meet professional standards must be made accountable.
In response to queries about whether any senior staff would face censure, the HSE said its focus was not ‘‘apportioning blame’’, but learning from weaknesses identified in its services. Durville said social workers were not hopeful of working in an improved environment any time soon.
‘‘In England, they have a social worker for every 500 people.
Here, we have one for every 1,600. That is a massive difference. The structure might be somewhat different between the two countries, so it is not an exact comparison, but it gives a good indication of how we compare."
Durville said that embargoes on hiring extra staff that were in place in 2002, and again in 2007, meant that Ireland was working off ‘‘a very low base’’. Heavy caseloads also meant that social workers were unable to intervene as early as they might like, as they were constantly forced to prioritise emergency cases, according to the IASW head.
‘‘Social workers are constantly prioritising and re-prioritising their workloads, which is having a detrimental effect on our ability to intervene early on," she said.
She added that many of the IASW’s 900 members had expressed concern over the inability to build up strong relationships with families and local communities due to their large caseloads. ‘‘Social workers need time to be able to talk to families about things like parenting.
You need to be able to build-up relationships with people. You cannot just walk into someone’s house and tell them what to do without having some history with that family. Nobody would accept it and it would not be appropriate," said Durville.
She said that the placement options available to social workers were also inadequate, with social workers constantly battling a lack of placement options for children whom they believed needed to be taken into care.
She said children who had been assessed as needing accommodation often ended up using the night-time emergency service because of a lack of appropriate beds.
‘‘The placement options for social workers are very limited," said Durville, who added that the needs of vulnerable children across the country were ‘‘not being met’’.
She also said that the shortcomings in the system had had a knock-on effect on staff morale. It had also become increasingly difficult to recruit and retain social workers who specialised in the area of children and families.
‘‘Many people do not want to come and work in this area. It is badly underresourced, and they know they will never be able to do the work in the way they are trained to do it. It is disheartening and there is a high turnover of staff as a result.
People get disillusioned with the system," Durville said.
Bringing noodles to Beijing
By Nicola Cooke
It’s not quite selling sand to the Arabs, but a noodle bar concept devised in Ireland has proved a big hit in China.
The Kitsu noodle bar, where fresh stir-fries are cooked in minutes, originated in the Dublin head office of BWG, which operates 468 Spar stores in Ireland. It has since been adopted as a key feature in Spar outlets in China, where noodles are a staple of the diet.
Almost 90 Spar outlets have opened in China in the last five years. Many of them feature noodle bars modelled on the Eurospar on Dublin’s Barrow Street.
A smoothie bar concept devised in Dublin has also made its way into Spar stores in Asia, Australia and Europe.
BWG managing director Willie O’Byrne said Irish convenience stores were at ‘‘the cutting-edge’’ of retailing.
BWG holds the chairmanship of Spar International, which ensures Spar outlets worldwide have a standard layout.
‘‘The first Spar store in Beijing will open in four weeks and it will have a large Kitsu noodle bar.
This tells you that Ireland, and our convenience stores, are leading the field," O’Byrne said.
He said the Barrow Street Spar store won a global convenience store award in 2007.The following year the award was won by a Spar store in Dongguan in China, which was modelled on the Barrow Street store.
The Treehouse smoothie bars from Irish Spar stores have been replicated in Italy and elsewhere. After a decade of double-digit growth, Spar Ireland sales increased by 2.8 per cent last year.
O’Byrne said this was the result of grocery price deflation, a move by consumers to Spar own-brand products, and an increase in store promotions and price cuts.
‘‘This new trend is hugely concerning, but we have still shown a continued growth in sales volumes and have not cut back on marketing.
We would hope to see turnover growth again in 2011,’’O’Byrne said.
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