Mr. Bernard Cantillon:

In terms of the advanced practitioner role, there is a greater responsibility to go to court and to fulfil statutory needs within child protection social work than in other areas of social work. There is a huge amount of responsibility and the gaze of the Health Information and Quality Authority, HIQA, on the work of both individual social workers and teams, is almost continuous. Experienced social workers have left to go to other areas of social work, and the reality on the ground is that the overwhelming majority of social workers in child protection teams, particularly in the Dublin area, only have a few years experience. The more experienced workers have either left or moved down the country. We end up in a situation where the team's experience might only be a few years old; they do not have the experience of decades that one would hope for across a functioning team that is nurturing its workers as they move through it. It is about capturing the experience one gains from having worked in a field for a long time and rewarding people for their expertise, saying we recognise that expertise by creating a grade which reflects the level of expertise and value a person brings to a team. Senior roles have been created in other areas of social work which have allowed people to advance from their grades into other areas without going through a separate recruitment process. That makes those other roles in social work more attractive to people, as well as the fact that they carry less responsibility and are not under a constant public gaze. Social workers welcome the work of HIQA in identifying flaws and failures in the system, but we sometimes feel we are being assessed in a situation where we do not have the resources to solve problems, because we do not have the staff coming in and are not able to retain the expertise that would allow us to produce or provide the best service we possibly could.