I thank you, a Cheann Comhairle, for selecting this matter and I thank the Minister of State at the Department of Health and Children. I refer to the report of the findings relating to the inspection of children's residential centres, which was completed by the social services inspectorate. A total of 12 centres which provided places for 61 children were inspected. Their ages ranged from four to 17 years. Many of the children have experienced profound loss and many have also suffered abuse and neglect.
It is important that the highest standards are maintained in these institutions. The work is difficult and personally demanding. I compliment the management and staff for their contribution. However, resources must be made available to ensure the optimum service for these children. Staff expertise and experience in their role is vital to the quality of service. There is concern at the recruitment, retention and training of staff, care planning and review, management and monitoring of residential care services and the support arrangements for children in residential care. This goes to the core of the service. I ask the Minister of State to address his fundamental issue in her reply.
There is urgent need for improvement in child care training. When will the expert group on various health professionals' recommendation that child care should be accorded a formal professional status and, as a consequence, the recruitment of non-qualified personnel to cease be implemented? The Minister of State must accept there is a need for the introduction of a nationally recognised professional qualification and the provision of in-service training for child care workers.
It is not acceptable that some centres are being run by staff with limited experience of residential child care. There must a clear career path for child care workers. Employing staff in such a delicate area on a temporary basis is not good enough. One cannot expect staff who are temporary to be as committed to the provision of dedicated care as those who occupy permanent care posts. There is a number of areas where concentrated action by the Minister is necessary if progress is to be achieved in raising the standards of residential child care services.
The Minister must, as a matter for urgency, establish a set of national standards for residen tial child care which would cover both voluntary and statutory sector centres. These standards must also apply to other institutions where children are cared for in out of home residential settings. Will the Minister address the failure of health boards to implement in full the statutory regulations that require a board to prepare a plan for the care of the child, before placing a child in a residential centre or as soon as practicable thereafter? It is not acceptable that inspections to date have shown that care planning is weak and sometimes ignored. This is a most unsatisfactory situation. As the report has pointed out, it can lead to children being allowed to drift in care, when good planning would have identified the matters requiring to be addressed and directed services towards those matters, thus enabling more children to be able to return to their homes or move on with confidence to living independently. Will the Minister accept that without proper care plans which set out the aims and objectives of the residential placement and the support to be provided the child, reviews of the cases of children in care are meaningless? I call on the Minister to guarantee that health boards will address planning and review procedures more seriously in future.
A further matter of concern is the lack of attention given by the boards to monitoring placements. The responsibility for monitoring of standards is clearly placed upon the health boards by article 17 of the Child Care Regulations, 1995. Various records are required to be maintained to facilitate this activity, but in many cases inspectors discovered that no authorised person had been appointed by the board to undertake the monitoring function. Consequently, managers relied on the accounts of residential managers regarding the standards of care being provided in centres. Normally, the line manager for the centre would be best placed to carry out this function, but it can be delegated to someone else who can, in turn, report the findings of monitoring exercises to the line manager. In some cases, line managers were surprised to learn of the findings of the inspectors. Had they carried out their role regularly they would have had a better idea about how the services were being provided. The board is left in a vulnerable position if it does not ensure regular monitoring of standards. While inspection will provide relevant information for those with responsibility for monitoring, it can only take place periodically. The views of children and their parents are very low in the system's list of priorities.
