Brendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)

I have been informed by the Health Service Executive that its 2008 national service plan commits it to developing from the end of the second quarter of this year a means of collecting information on the following for each administrative area: the number of notifications made of child abuse or neglect, the number of assessments conducted following notifications, the number of children on waiting lists for assessments following notification of child abuse or neglect and the average time spent on a waiting list for assessment following notification of child abuse or neglect. Reporting against this information will be based on the phased implementation of standardised business processes through the child care information system project.

Since the inception of the Office of the Minister for Children, there has been a significant build up in both the flow and quality of management information available. Key components of this information management include the analysis of the child care interim data set prepared annually by the HSE and the regular service plan monitoring reports submitted to the Department of Health and Children. The further development of this information strategy is set to continue with the completion of the joint Office of the Minister for Children and HSE knowledge management policy and its subsequent implementation plan. This implementation will include a pilot scheme which will integrate the children service data sets with other relevant HSE data sets.

All of these initiatives, if accompanied by planned commentary and analysis, will allow for much enhanced management of children's services by cross-referencing a series of relevant data and research sources via the shared health atlas tool. It is anticipated that this capacity will begin to be available to HSE and Office of the Minister for Children policy makers, managers and frontline staff in 2009 in line with the requirements and approach of the Office of the Minister for Children developed agenda of children services, the overarching policy for children services in Ireland.

The Office of the Minister for Children meets regularly with the HSE to monitor such service provision and policy related issues. These meetings are an integral part of the response to the issues raised by Deputy Shatter in the context of the overarching policy, the agenda for children's services, which I launched in December 2007.

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