Katherine Zappone (Dublin South West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will discuss Tusla now. In 2018, Tusla expects to recruit an additional 45 social workers, 57 social care workers, nine nursing staff and 53 other health professionals, which include early years inspectors, speech and language therapists and occupational therapists. That is a significant portion of the breakdown of the 422 extra whole-time equivalent employees it will recruit. The grade breakdown for the remaining 145 is being finalised. Family support workers are to be recruited. The officials and I have been encouraging Tusla to complete its workforce strategy which it will do shortly for this year and for the next couple of years. That will assist considerably in determining the mix of staff required to do the work of Tusla. It is not to say that we do not need to continue to recruit the social workers.

The Deputy asked whether we were engaging with other Departments to do that and the answer is yes, especially the Department of Education and Skills. That is more medium to long-term. There is continuing engagement between the officials, Tusla and the Department of Education and Skills to establish how many social workers we can turn out through higher education because we need more, not just for Tusla but for other agencies and organisations. Therefore, it is important to work in the medium and long term to increase the number of social workers available to be recruited but also to be clear and creative about the mix of the overall workforce to respond appropriately to the number of services, referrals and cases, and family, early intervention and prevention work that Tusla does.

The other thing that is a key aspect that will be supportive for Tusla is the fact that there has been a major ICT roll-out - not just the national child care information system but the development of a strategy as well as the increase in something as simple as the number of laptops social workers and other workers will have so that they will be able to do their work more efficiently and get to the work they are intended to do as distinct from the time it might have taken in terms of administrative aspects so it would impact positively on staff productivity. As Deputies are aware, Tusla established its own recruitment programme to deal with the significant issue of recruiting and the various types of professionals in addition to social workers. There does not appear to have been significant issues recruiting most other grades with the exception of social workers. It is important to acknowledge that Tusla has taken a proactive approach with regard to the other professionals it is looking for.

In response to Deputy Mitchell's question about the open cases, 24,891 open cases were identified as needing a social work service at the end of 2017. That goes back to a question from Deputy Rabbitte. Of these, 19,999 had a named allocated social worker so, therefore, 4,892 were awaiting the allocation of a social worker, which represents 20% of the open cases. I remind members that where a child needs an urgent response, they are dealt with urgently and immediately by the social workers. The number of social workers at the end of 2017 was 1,466. We hope that by the end of 2018, there will be an additional 45 so it needs to recruit 214 to achieve this because of those who will be leaving. It is important to note that in addition to social workers, Tusla also utilises another agency for social workers in order to complete the work.