The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has published an inspection report on the foster care service operated by the Child and Family Agency (Tusla) in the Dublin South West/Kildare/West Wicklow service area.

HIQA is authorised by the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs under Section 69 of the Child Care Act, 1991, as amended by Section 26 of the Child Care (Amendment) Act 2011, to inspect foster care services provided by Tusla, to report on its findings to the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs and to inspect services taking care of a child on behalf of Tusla, including non-statutory providers of foster care. HIQA monitors foster care services against the 2003 National Standards for Foster Care.

As part of its 2019 and 2020 monitoring programme, HIQA is conducting inspections across all 17 Tusla service areas, focusing on six standards. Due to the level of risks found on previous inspections in this area in relation to the management of unallocated foster carers, delays in completing relative assessments, the backlog of foster carer reviews and the functioning of the foster care committee, HIQA also included these issues in this inspection.

HIQA conducted an inspection of the Dublin South West/Kildare/West Wicklow service, located in Tusla’s Dublin Mid Leinster region, from 9 to 12 September 2019. Of the six standards assessed, one standard was compliant, one standard was substantially compliant, and four standards were found to be non-compliant, all of which were identified as moderate non-compliances. Progress in addressing previously identified risks continued to be inadequate. 

Children who met or spoke with inspectors felt safe and were happy and well cared for in their placements. Children spoke warmly about their foster carers, and children who had an allocated social worker spoke positively about them.

Of 365 children in care in the foster care service, four out of five (294 or 81%) had an allocated social worker while one in five (71 or 19%) did not. Seven (2%) who did not have an allocated social worker lived in placements where the foster carers did not have allocated link social workers (dual-unallocated). The area recruited a number of new social workers in 2019 and expected that more children would have an allocated social worker by the end of 2019.

Some children had not been visited in line with regulations during the two years prior to this inspection. Inspectors wrote to the area manager and received an assurance that a small number of children who had not been visited by a social worker within the previous six months were visited during or shortly after the inspection. There was insufficient evidence of adequate oversight of unallocated cases by way of regular review of the cases and the quality of record-keeping in some children’s files was either poor or in need of improvement.

Good quality assessments of need were carried out on all children placed in foster care. Systems were in place to ensure that comprehensive assessments of need were undertaken and that children had medical examinations upon admission to care.

Thirty-four children were overdue a child in care review, and 34 care plans were not up to date. While the quality of care plans varied, the majority of care plans reviewed considered all of the children’s care needs. Placement plans had not been developed in the area prior to this inspection.

Voluntary consent provided by parents regarding their children’s admission to care was regularly reviewed and updated. However, in the cases of 15 children who were in their placements for more than two years, there was no evidence that the issue of making these placements more secure was discussed or planned for.

The aftercare service was not fully resourced to provide a timely and comprehensive service. There were too few aftercare workers to allocate an aftercare worker to all children and young people assessed as needing one. While children leaving care had their needs assessed and had aftercare plans in place, not all had an aftercare plan by the age of 17 and a half years old.

Social workers were committed to protecting children from all forms of abuse, and complaints, concerns and allegations against foster carers were well managed. However, the tracking of child protection and welfare concerns against people other than the children’s foster carers required improvement. Social workers put safety plans in place to protect children, but there was no system of standardised safety planning to ensure that comprehensive safety plans were in place with good oversight of their implementation.

While the management of unallocated cases had improved, current management systems did not support good oversight of all unallocated foster carers by senior managers. Despite improvements, there continued to be significant delays in the assessment of relative carers. This issue was escalated to the service director for assurance and the response provided was satisfactory.

Insufficient progress had been made in relation to foster carer reviews since the last inspection; however, there was a plan for a dedicated team leader and two social workers to work on foster carer reviews from October 2019 and it was estimated that it would take a further 13 months to get all foster carer reviews up to date.

The foster care committee had improved their administrative systems. However, issues such as the approval of relative foster carers who had not received basic training and the ability of the committee to track improvements, some of which had not been recorded as specific recommendations, had not been addressed.

This area is now subject to a service improvement plan, which has been put in place by the Tusla National Office.

Furthermore, the service area has provided an action plan response to address the non-compliances identified on inspection. The report and action plan can be found at www.hiqa.ie.