http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/docs-staff-fear-stress-overload/2008/11/25/1227491548393.htmlDOCS staff fear stress overload
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Adele Horin
November 26, 2008
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BURNOUT and high staff turnover will only worsen at the Department of Community Services if its workers deal solely with the most difficult child protection cases, staff said yesterday.
Under a blueprint for a new child protection system made public on Monday, the department would handle only cases where children were deemed to be at risk of "significant" harm.
Less serious cases would be dealt with by other agencies. The department would no longer manage the bulk of the state's foster care or provide early intervention services to families. Non-government child welfare agencies would take up these roles.
"DOCS will be the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff," said Steve Turner, the assistant general secretary of the Public Service Association, which represents the department's workers. "It's hard enough to recruit and retain DOCS workers now but if we limit them to the most stressful work, potentially the turnover will be even higher and it will be harder to recruit."
Justice James Wood's report on the state's child protection system concluded that a triage system was needed to filter the 300,000 calls a year to DOCS so that only the most urgent and serious made their way to its helpline.
A child protection worker told the Herald the model would leave DOCS workers doing only high-end child protection work. In a trimmed-down department, shorn of many of its current responsibilities, workers would have little ability to move to other jobs if they needed a break, she said.
Chris Goddard, the director of Child Abuse Prevention Research Australia, at Monash University, said the proposal emulated the Victorian model that had been in place for about 18 months.
"It has not yet been independently evaluated and there is no evidence to suggest it is working," he said.
However, the director of the Centre for Child Protection at the University of South Australia, Dorothy Scott, said the reforms were "the only way to go".
Formerly from Victoria, Professor Scott was co-author of a submission to the inquiry that proposed the model Justice Wood subsequently adopted.
"Up to now DOCS is the first port of call where people have concerns about a child. It's the equivalent of having a health system consisting of a huge casualty department," she said. "With one in 15 children being notified to the department there has to be a broader range of options."
Under the proposed model, child protection units would be set up in key government departments, such as education and police, to assess whether cases were serious enough for referral to DOCS. If not, they would be referred to a new service run by non-government organisations.
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