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IRELAND’S CHILD PROTECTION and welfare services are to be subject to independent inspection and monitoring.
Today’s announcement from the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) aims to strengthen and improve the services that currently exist.
The director of regulation at HIQA, Phelim Quinn, said that the move was “a significant milestone in putting safer and more reliable child protection and welfare systems in place for vulnerable and at-risk children.”
Quinn went on to say that, until now, the needs of children had “not been a priority” in how child protection and welfare support services had responded to concerns.
“The scale and seriousness of documented child abuse and neglect in Ireland has highlighted this in several reports,” Quinn said.
Monitoring programme
HIQA will now adopt the following steps in relation to monitoring:
The first child protection and welfare inspection report from HIQA is set to be published online in the coming weeks.
Vice-Chair of the Oireachtas Health Committee, Deputy Ciara Conway, welcomed the move, calling it a “positive development, and one which I warmly welcome.”
She added:
HIQA does valuable work and I am confident that it will be able to identify any areas where standards need to be improved. I look forward to their reports in this area.
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In other words Ireland does not and never has had a fit for purpose child protection and welfare systems as it was never monitored in the first place.
It is very sad – giving our litany of failures in our child protection & welfare services over the last decade that this is only happening now. I can clearly remember the unannounced visit of inspectors to my social work office in the UK in late 90′s. The random selection of my files and me praying I had done my job right. I was never sanctioned for bad practice – and thus the drive to ensure I never would – it’s what made me a safe practitioner and ensured the children on my case load were safe. Lets hope the HIQA inspections will have the same impact.
I dunno.. Inspections in this country tend to be prearranged.. So if HIQA are coming you can bet your ass the staff will have had a chance to ensure that they have everything in order before the inspector shows up..
Penalise bad parenting and maybe the job might get easier
penalise bad parenting …..I for one would be interested in how you would “penalise bad parenting”, have you any concrete ideas or are you just having a Father Ted moment ‘down with that sort of thing’ approach that’s just hot air?
What I’d like to know is, if someone reports child abuse to a relevant person, who then refuses to take action, what should happen next?
that person is legally responsible and failure to report/act on info could lead to disciplinary/criminal action
From whom and how does the disciplinarian find out?
Difficult to answer that without knowing the organisation, is it a charity, statutory or voluntary organisation, what are the child protection policies in place etc
There is a serious lack of social care workers in most areas, even if you had to phone them in an emergency they were sometime unreachable, esp at weekends… I was told once that unless it was sexual abuse they were in no “hurry” to intervene… Just to watch the situation..
No no no. This can’t be right. The problem with child protection was a lack of a specific clause in the Constitution. I distinctly remember that that’s what we were all told. It was nothing to do with the service delivery being inept.
recommended reading the irish constitution. flawed………. flawed re the last change as well. flawed to suit the top people not genuine not at all.
those lot have run this country into the ground and the previous lot and the previous lot…….. how many emigrated how many on dole ques with no work or trying to look after families or foster care of shoddy treatments and kenny and his band of bandits eat plenty i bet he never cleaned toilets sure he could afford a cleaner .. did burton ever eat one meal a day or que for dole or gilmore or bacik or get a good education or refuse to take a pay cut…..
some of us are and were good parents………. despite those of us who arent all married or working in the corporate or bending over to get abused or robbed or lied to or laughed at or social workers forcing their way into homes or lying or ignoring parents or difficulties or stopping payments and some of us would be good parents even if they lie or say otherwise.. or commit women or force them drugs or commit them or abuse them or degrade them like experience ive encountered……….. there has to be change but child protection yes but starving families or taking all the cuts off families who struggle or those who dont have kids to judge this with individuals who like to arrange stuff or nice pay or eat three times a day or wear the pr talk ……………. what about the kids homeless on the streets whose parents maybe died or suffered abuse .. what about them……….. what about the homeless as well and the children or the causes of what creates it……. cuts in benefits cuts in book school help cuts to things and no work penalised for working or top wages for kenny burton and gilmore etc. huh?
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