Mr. Tim Hanly:

The nine safeguarding teams are based in each of the community health organisations, so notifications come in on two formats, one of which is from the residential and the service setting, which are submitted as screenings. A number of designated officers carry out screenings and the Health Service Executive has an oversight of the adequacy of that screening in respect of any concern that has been raised. The other element is that direct reports come in to us from the community, from family members, from older people themselves or persons with a disability. They are the community-based referrals.

My colleague mentioned that of the 8,000 referrals last year, 3,000 were community-based referrals with the remainder from residential and service settings.

The safeguarding teams have responsibility for the community or direct referrals, to carry out a direct screening and to consider if there should be a protection plan and if there are reasonable grounds for concern. The social work teams follow good practice by considering what is in the report, the detail of it, the view of the person him or herself and any other information that needs to be gathered. There is a supervision system via their team leaders and there is overall management by the professional social workers.

There is a need to consider greater resourcing as the service develops. In the last year alone we saw a 60% increase in direct community-based referrals from January through to December. We believe that might be linked to greater awareness and the training programme we have been running. The service is able to respond. We do need to look critically into the future. Legislation and the widening of the scope and operational remit of safeguarding will give more responsibility to those social work teams. We must be very mindful of matching the resource. We also need to be mindful of where the resource is placed. Other people have mentioned the need for prevention and raising awareness. It is not just responding to abuse or concerns of abuse but also making sure that structures are in place, that our staff are trained in order that early intervention is possible and that systems are in place to catch these before problems develop.

Our teams are busy in terms of the number of reports. They apply their good social work practice. We expect reports to increase and we have seen an increasing number of reports already. The teams became operational in 2015. An elder abuse service has been in place since 2007, which was well established and has been incorporated into our safeguarding teams who now have overall responsibility for both disability and older persons. We foresee a greater demand and a greater need going into the future and that would be reflective of any expansion of the scope of the policy and any legislative impact.