HIQA has 'significant concern' over child residential care issues

Michael Bolton

The Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) has expressed "significant concern" over children living in unregulated special accommodation arrangements.

HIQA has released a new report, detailing its monitoring of children's services over the last 10 years.

It says Tusla has made significant efforts in recruitment, but continued vacancies and a lack of both residential and foster care placements are impacting on children in need.

From 2013 to 2024, referrals to Tusla increased from 43,630 to 91,924.

HIQA also found that many children were not allocated social workers or else experienced multiple changes in social workers over short periods of time.

During this time, the number of Children in care decreased from 6,643 to 5,615.

The report also said was also a lack of suitable foster care and residential care placements for children requiring admission to care.

This lack of placements has also led to children being unable to move on from some services when they are ready to do so. While Tusla has used social care staff to mitigate the risk associated with social work vacancies, vacancies persisted in many services.

Eva Boyle, HIQA’s Head of Programme for Children’s Services, said: “While there is an ongoing commitment to delivering good quality and safe services to children, Tusla faces a number of consistent challenges, particularly around adequate resources for its services.”

“It is crucial to ensure that children have access to the right service and for children to be able to build trusting relationships with the staff they interact with. Children, parents and foster carers have consistently told us that they receive a good service when they have a consistent staff member working with them.

"We found that there is a significant shortage of appropriate residential and foster care placements for children. This has resulted in some children in care being accommodated in inappropriate and unregulated special emergency arrangements which is of significant concern.

"Despite children living in unregulated care arrangements, the regulation of children’s residential centres has not been commenced.”