B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth says the province’s child protection services are understaffed and pushed to the limit, and the Ministry of Children and Family Development needs to bring in more front-line workers to meet child safety standards.
Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond has released a report this morning that shows a mismatch between the expectations placed on B.C. child protection service workers and the number of staff province wide actually available and present in the office to do the work required.
“Despite the demands and complexity of the job increasing in recent years, there are actually fewer frontline protection workers today in B.C. than there were in 2002,” said Turpel-Lafond.
She says the result is that prescribed child protection timelines routinely go unmet, vulnerable children are too often left in unsafe situations, and the social workers are being asked to do more.
Her report says frontline workers report chronic levels of stress, impossibly high workloads, too much organizational change within the ministry without proper support, and the new computer system launched in 2012 that added more complexity and instability to the system.
“Not a single worker we interviewed reported being able to regularly meet child protection timelines. Not a single worker,” said Turpel-Lafond.
When looking at timelines of the files already open, she says more than 85 per cent are open beyond 90 days when the standard is 30 to 45 days.
In addition, at any given time, 10 per cent of those positions are left unfilled due to various leaves, vacations, sick time and recruitment issues.
Remote offices, in particular, have found it difficult over the years to recruit and retain staff and very little has been done to reverse that.
“Staff at those locations suffer from burn-out and disillusionment as they struggle to keep the children safe,” said Turpel-Lafond.
One of the key areas of concern for Turpel-Lafond is documentation falls to the wayside when these types of workload and stress situations occur.
The oversight does not just involve paper work, but failure to provide essential safety information that needs to be kept and be accessible to the next worker when decisions are to be made about the safety of a child.
“If an incident is not recorded, a new social worker investigating a subsequent child protection report may not have the proper context in which to judge that a child is safe in a home with a parent,” she says.
The review, which involved 51 direct interviews with social workers and file audits, took four years for Turpel-Lafond and her office to complete, making it the first comprehensive, independent assessment of the function of child welfare on the ground in British Columbia.
But the Ministry of Children and Family Development says Turpel-Lafond’s report is dated, adding 110 new child protection workers across B.C. have been hired since last November and the feedback from staff and team leaders has been positive so far.
Turpel-Lafond says it is a positive sign, but the outflow in the system is high because it has been systemically starved.
Turpel-Lafond says she wants the government to add 250 positions immediately to bring the child protection services up to a position of functional stability.
She is confident there is a workforce available to be recruited and retained to fill in the positions.
“The bottom line is quite inescapable,” she says. “The provincial government needs to step up and fund child protection at a level that will consistently keep children safe and allow staff to meet what are, in my eye, reasonable standards that should be met.”
To read the full report, go here.
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