continued from the above......


Mandatory reporting of suspect cases will stay, as it should. But in the recent past, the Department of Community Services has been snowed by hundreds of thousands of non-urgent reports passed on routinely by front-line professionals such as police, teachers and doctors. Overwhelmed, it has at times been unable to identify and respond quickly to serious cases. Children have died as a result. Moreover, the workload has diverted resources so families at less risk of serious harm, but still needing help, were neglected. The key question for Justice Wood therefore was: how to filter the serious from the trivial.

The present arrangements place the onus for reporting on those in the front line, with penalties for remaining silent. They have reacted to that threat by over-reporting. As has been pointed out, sometimes children have been reported for infestations of head lice. Such things obviously do not constitute neglect.

Justice Wood's recommendations remove the filtering to new units in the bureaucracy; front-line professionals would report to DOCS only children at imminent risk of significant harm. Those two qualifiers give teachers, police, doctors and nurses necessary leeway to use the judgment they have been withholding. Other cases would go to filter units in each department; these would decide which should go to DOCS and which to new region-based aid services. Justice Wood suggests these be outsourced to non-government organisations. That is a way to increase the resources available for welfare tasks but it does not meet the most important need in his new structure - in the bureaucracy itself.

If this system is to work, the filtering units in the health, education and police departments, and others, must be given the money and the experts to do the job properly. Money obviously is tight. There will be pressure on departments to shift resources from elsewhere to this new function. That will probably mean it will be neglected. As for extra staff with expertise in this highly sensitive area, where they will be found is anyone's guess. DOCS already has trouble finding case officers.

Certainly, change must come; it is in the implementation, however, that it will live or die.


http://www.smh.com.au/news/opinion/...y-violence/2008/11/25/1227491540334.html