Over 900 children in HSE care have no social worker

MORE THAN 900 children in the care of the Health Service Executive do not have an allocated social worker, new figures show.

While there are 5,529 children in care, just 4,623 or 83.6 per cent of them have an allocated social worker. The data, which reflects the position at the end of March, was provided to a recent meeting of the HSE board.

The figures show the situation is worst in the Dublin/North East region, where 30 per cent of children in care do not have an allocated social worker. But in the West, just 4.5 per cent of children in care do not have an allocated social worker.

The majority of these children in care are with foster families.

At the launch of the HSE’s annual report for 2008 yesterday, the head of the HSE Prof Brendan Drumm, admitted it did not have sufficient social workers.

Asked how confident he was that the 5,000-plus children in care at the end of last year were being well cared for given the shortage of social workers, Prof Drumm indicated the real concern was the numbers of reports of at-risk children in the community for whom social workers could not be allocated .

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