Frances Fitzgerald (Dublin Mid West, Fine Gael)

As Minister for Children and Youth Affairs, I have statutory responsibility for the child welfare and protection services. My colleague, the Minister for Health, in conjunction with the Minister for State with responsibility for disability, equality and mental health services and older people, has responsibility for mental health and disability services. I work closely with both, as I do with all members of the Government on children's issues. The question on the detailed service information sought relating to disability and mental health servcies would be most appropriately addressed to the Minister with direct responsibility for these services. The Minister of State, Deputy Kathleen Lynch, was in the House earlier this afternoon to reply to specific questions relating to services within her remit.

The HSE has adopted a planned approach at national, regional and local level to the management of departures as a result of staff retiring. We had a discussion about the social work side earlier. The overall situation is set out in the national and regional service plans for 2012. The HSE's overarching aim is to protect critical front-line essential services and use a range of measures to manage the staffing situation, which includes using the provisions of the Croke Park agreement and delivering greater productivity through the reform of service delivery. Where critical gaps in services cannot be filled through redeployment, reconfiguration or reorganisation of services, some €16 million has been provided in the national service plan for the filling of priority vacancies.

More generally, my Department works with other Departments to harmonise and co-ordinate policies relating to children. During the current year this will be achieved through the development of a children and young people's policy framework and an early years strategy. Both policies will address health outcomes for children and the co-ordination of services to promote children's health and well-being. This is the first time we will have had a national policy for the early years and we will look at the range of services we need to deliver to that age group and their co-ordination. At a policy level, this will involve working across Departments.

Additional information not given on the floor of the House.

My Department will be working with the Department of Health to address these issues, with a particular focus on those children with the greatest needs, including disabilities and mental health problems.

Child protection teams are based geographically in the local health area office. During 2010 and 2011, 260 additional social workers were recruited and assigned across the country to child protection teams and children in care teams. The latest data available from the HSE show that in January 2012 the total number of social workers employed in children and family services providing services for children at risk and in care was 1,220 whole-time equivalents. It is important to stress that there is no moratorium on filling social work posts within the overall public sector numbers. The national director of children and family services will apply his discretion over the course of the year to the filling of vacancies, subject to meeting overall employment targets and on the basis that services are being delivered within available resources.

The Deputy refers to cases being recorded on at risk registers. He may be referring to the establishment by the HSE of a national child protection register as part of the child protection notification system which records children where, following an assessment and a case conference, the view is that there is a child protection risk. I have been assured that all referrals of child welfare and protection cases are assessed by the duty or in-take team. Those cases identified as the most serious or urgent are allocated immediately to a social worker. Other referrals may benefit from referral to a family support service, while some cases may be referred to other services. The number of referrals to the team will always be significantly greater than those in the child protection notification system, as the majority of referrals are not assessed as involving a child protection risk.

I am advised by the HSE that there was a total of 29,277 child protection and welfare reports to it in 2010. A total of 16,452 of these reports related to concerns about a child's welfare, while 12,825 were related to child protection concerns, that is, physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect. Of the 12,825 cases related to child protection concerns, 1,556 were confirmed as abuse cases and notified to the child protection notification management team.

The standardised business process to ensure consistent definitions for the purposes of information reporting is being worked out across all 32 LHOs in the HSE. I anticipate that the information available in 2012 will be of a higher standard. Since taking office last year I have been dissatisfied with the quality and accuracy of information available from the HSE on child protection, as well as the HSE's capacity to provide timely and meaningful information. I am pleased to inform the Deputy that significant progress is now being made by the HSE to remedy this. A major information technology project, the national child care information system, NCCIS, has now gone to tender. The NCCIS will be the central system supporting social work services. As a social work case management system, it will be used to record and store the case history of every child and other clients of the service. Management information will be derived automatically from it.

The aim of the NCCIS project is to identify and procure an easy to use technology solution to support this type of case recording and automatically provide management information. A first step was to develop agreed and consistent definitions and business processes across all social work offices. In this regard, a national standardised business process has been rolled out nationally. This will ensure the definitions used are consistent, for example, to ensure the number of recorded referrals relates to individual children, not families. I am confident that the process being led by Mr. Gordon Jeyes, the HSE national director of children and family services, will deliver the information needed.

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