Report urges more for kids

Barb Pacholik, Leader-Post, May 7, 2014

A report by the province’s child watchdog is a study in contrasts – the hope offered by a new Regina program assisting high-risk moms, the despair of two babies’ deaths due to gaps in the child welfare system.

While buoyed by a new risk assessment tool that could help prevent more such deaths, Saskatchewan’s advocate for children and youth Bob Pringle remains worried social workers with high caseloads won’t have the ability to use it properly.

“They need to get a handle on this issue – and fast,” Pringle said during a news conference releasing his annual report Tuesday. Social Services Minister June Draude told reporters strides are being made.

“We have decreased the numbers of caseloads. They went down about 23 per cent in the last number of years,” she said. “We’re going in the right direction, but we know that there’s always more work that we can be doing.”

In the cases involving the two deaths, from 2006-07, profiled in the report, workers cited workloads in excess of 40 cases. Draude said 80 per cent of child protection workers now carry a load between 15 and 20 cases, although in some of those the needs are higher.

In a province with the highest rate of First Nations children living in poverty, Pringle also took the government to task for its failure to have an over-arching antipoverty strategy. Saskatchewan and B.C. are the only provinces without one.

He said poverty and the social conditions that it can spawn, including addictions, family violence and poor mental health, result in children coming into care.

“We are reaching far too many children far too late,” he said.

“If we continue not to address major risk factors, not that much is going to change,” Pringle said. “We’ll continue to pick up the pieces.”

Draude said there are two strategies currently underway that will have an impact on poverty – one on mental health and addictions and the other on disabilities.

“It will help formulate the next steps,” Draude added.

Pringle’s report profiles the deaths of two children born to drug-addicted mothers. “Our child protection system left these vulnerable children in high-risk situations,” the report says. Gaps and non-compliance with policy contributed to the deaths at the hands of their mothers when the children were returned to their care without proper monitoring and support, it says.

A seven-month-old girl died from injuries. In the other case, a 16-month-old died from a treatable skin infection, but there were also other signs the girl had endured months of physical abuse and neglect.

Pringle cited caseloads and communication failures, but those concerns have been repeatedly raised by children’s advocates going back to the first one in 1998 to examine the death of a child in the province’s welfare system.

While admitting he’s “not happy” some of these same issues keep arising, the advocate said he has more reason to hope that there will be some resolution based on discussions with Social Services. He also applauded a new residential facility called Raising Hope that opened last fall in Regina to assist pregnant women who were likely to have their babies apprehended due to high-risk behaviours.

For the first time, the annual report contains statistics on the number of child deaths and critical injury reports received by the advocate’s office in the previous year. Past reports gave numbers for cases “cleared” by the office in a given year, but the deaths and injuries didn’t necessarily occur within that year.

The report says 26 child deaths and 34 critical injury cases were referred to the advocate’s office in 2013 for an independent review. Those numbers include children and youth who were in care of or in receipt of social services in the 12 months prior, and incidents involving youths receiving services from the Justice Ministry and Corrections and Policing within the previous 30 days.

Among the deaths, two-thirds of the children were under age five. While the cause of death wasn’t yet available in 10 cases, in the others it included suicide, medical fragility, homicide, sudden infant death syndrome, motor vehicle collisions, fire and illness.

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