Director of Children and Young People Services within the Southern Health & Social Care Trust (SHSCT), Colm McCafferty has revealed that the pressure being faced by his department is greater than ever, with close to 700 children currently in the care system in the Southern region.
The senior Trust official made his comments when addressing the Southern HSC Trust board panel at a recent board meeting.
Mr McCafferty stated: “[There are] significant challenges in relation to what communities are faced with at the moment.
“Challenges include significant long-standing social work workforce problems, in terms of being able to recruit and retain sufficient numbers across all of our services for the delivery of effective social work services.
“There’s an increasing number of looked-after children in the system. We have the highest number of children in the care system in the Southern Trust that we’ve ever had, just shy of 700 children at the moment.
“That is reflective of very significant challenges across communities, increasing referrals to all metrics across all directorates and all specialisms, including that of mental health.
“Critically, our demographics continue to change significantly, in the sense that we are increasingly an older population. That has implications in social work and social care, in relation to community support and so forth.
“It would be remiss of me not to mention the budgetary constraints that we’re all operating in. That is equally applicable to community services and social work.
“Those challenges are very reflective, on the one hand, of geopolitical events and international events, in terms of meeting the needs of new entrants, asylum seekers and so forth. Social work has a critical role to play in terms of that.
“The overall challenges must also be considered in the context of what is now multi-year cycles of austerity and indeed, very tangible poverty across communities, which manifests itself in demand for social work and social care services.
“Mental health continues to be very prevalent with regards to many of our services, the impact of domestic abuse on children crossing into adults, and indeed the impact on families and communities. Those are very significant challenges.”
Mr McCafferty stressed, however, that there are positive developments, particularly on the recruiting front, to meet those challenges.
He continued: “The Social Work service across directorates continues to seek to innovate. I am glad to be able to report that there is some trajectory towards staffing recovery in the sense that between now and September, we will be appointing 42 newly-qualified social work staff.
“That will not cover all of our vacancies, but it will certainly put us in a much stronger place than we’ve been in for the last four or five years.
“We have worked at pace in relation to the introduction of skills mix and the professionalisation of that.
“That is not as a substitute to social work, it is about enhancing the social work resource that we have, but it is also in response to very changing needs with regard to social care in the community.
“There’s also very clear evidence of improved metrics around annual reviews, carers’ assessment, performance in relation to child protection, in relation to adult safeguarding and so forth.
“So, despite the challenges that we have, we do have a very clear understanding of where we need to afford attention and develop services, and I feel more confident [now] that our workforce is on the trajectory towards stability.
“It’ll still take us a number of years to get it to where we want it to be.”
