Ms Eva Boyle:

I thank Deputy Neville for his question. He queried the distances children are placed away from their local communities. It very much varies. There are scenarios in which children are in the nearest town or village but others in which they are perhaps a few hundred miles away from their families of origin. We find that Tusla staff endeavour to make sure the child has regular contact, where appropriate, with his or her family, and a lot of time and resources have gone into those arrangements to ensure that happens.

I will come back to the issue of the notifications that Deputy Rabbitte raised.

Deputy Lisa Chambers queried what Tusla says when HIQA finds problems with a service, other than raising resource issues with us. Tusla is very clear that it is starting a number of new processes regarding monitoring and quality assurance. We have seen the start of some of those processes in individual areas and would reference some of those new management systems being in place but they are at a very early stage of implementation throughout the country.

The barriers to becoming a foster carer are varied. They can be societal. A greater number of women and men are working full-time outside the family home, and there are challenges there in terms of arrangements for individuals. That is just a personal observation rather than something that has come up through the course of inspection. However, the majority of foster carers tell us that they are well supported. When they do not have link workers, they find that difficult. They occasionally experience delays in staff getting back to them and they find that frustrating. Due to the fact that they care for children, they need someone at the end of the phone to be able to answer to their questions. Service consistency is something foster carers highlight as important to them. They wish to be well supported and to be supervised so that they can run matters by their link workers. They might ask whether they are doing something right or ask for a little help with something. These are things they identify and, in turn, they are essential elements in attracting more people into fostering.

A safety plan is a basic plan whereby measures to keep a child safe are laid down. A practical example would be a child not having contact with a person against whom an allegation of abuse has been made. That would be at a very basic level. It may be that they have supervised contact, but it is a written plan that is laid down so that everyone caring for this child knows how to keep him or her safe. The plan should also be reviewed so that it does not stay the same. If there has been an investigation and no risk is found, the plan should be amended to reflect that it is now safe for the child in a certain situation or with a certain individual. We have mixed experiences of finding these. There is often a plan in place but it is not always written down. On occasions when we find that there is no safety plan, we would go to a manager while we are on site and ask what the plan is to keep the child safe. We make sure that there is a definite plan before we leave.

Regarding how HIQA knows about problems, information comes to us in a number of ways. We receive unsolicited information from members of the public who telephone us. This could consist of concerns; sometimes we receive compliments about a service. We also get some information from Tusla in the form of published statistics and we examine those figures regularly. We risk-rate that information and make decisions about our monitoring and what follow-up we need to carry out as a result of the information.

The area of foster care training requires ongoing development. Most foster carers are given a range of training options but those options are dependent on the areas in which they are based.

That has improved in recent years. Foster carers who commence training generally receive a comprehensive foundation training package outlining expectations in terms of children meeting with their birth families, expectations in terms of foster carers' own families, safeguarding and so on. Children often have emotional needs and they may have a disability or educational needs and foster carers may therefore have additional training needs. At times, there are shortcomings in regard to those specific needs being met. There are training plans for foster carers in all areas. The training plans vary in terms of quality of content and what they offer for foster carers.

In regard to Deputy Jim Daly's queries on the 6% of placements that are in the private sector, the standard of service provision in the private sector varies. It is similar to the fact that children in some areas of the country have access to a range of services through the HSE and have no problem accessing those services. Some private organisations have professionals such as psychologists employed on a sessional or full-time basis which gives ease of access to children under their care. Foster carers in private agencies often tell us that a link person from the agency is available to them 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and that that is a motivating factor for the carers deciding to go with that particular agency.

I have not done an analysis in respect of value for money and therefore cannot comment on it.