In the interests of Children - Chapter One
- Details
- Category: NSW Ombudsman
- Created: Monday, 16 July 2012 19:40
- Written by Michael Hart
Many social researchers acknowledge the harm that was done to several generations of Aboriginal due to a blanket social policies of child removal in past generations. These were, at the time, claimed to be in the interests if those children involved. We now know that is untrue. While it may have helped some children it is known to be, on the whole, bad social policy and damaged more than it helped.
Despite the mistakes of the past, blanket social policies are being advocated today by researchers in Child Protection. It has been reported that children from foster care have poor outcomes[1] with the description of “the lost generation” being used for those children that go through the foster system and reports of increasing numbers of offences being from children who have come through the foster system. Yet researchers like Jeremy Sammut uses exactly the same terminology – “a lost generation” –to advocate for a blanket policy of child removal[2].
Dr Sammut claims that “They are being lost due to the favoured family-preservation approach to child protection in Australia.” He makes the claim that family support is the favoured approach to Child Protection despite the fact that, as we have demonstrated, only 10% of the total Child Protection funds goes to family support – with 90% of the money going to lawyers and foster care. At Alecomm we suggest that these figures demonstrate that foster care is the “favoured approach” to child protection, followed by making sure layers are well kept and, contrary to Dr Sammut’s claims, family support is the very “least favoured approach” to Child Protection.
Having said that, however, we do recognize there may be a very small number of cases where children need to be removed so we would not advocate a “blanket” or “policy” approach to Child Protection. We ask readers to consider what it would be like if hospitals took a “policy” approach to the medical intervention they delivered? For argument’s sake we could claim the hospitals have a policy of amputating the patient’s right leg when they reported to the ED department.
This would be a great policy for the doctors. They wouldn’t have to think. They would not be responsible for the medical decisions they had to make. In fact they wouldn’t have to use any medical expertise at all.
But what happens if the patient comes in with a something slightly different wrong? Like their left arm was broken? The doctor would chop of their right leg, because of the policy emphasis, and send the patient home. While the hospital activity measures would make it look OK to do this because of there is the claim that a successful operation was performed according to policy, we hope that most Alecomm readers would realise this does nothing to help the patient.
In hospitals any emphasis on a particular intervention is clearly a disadvantage to the patient. All cases must be diagnosed by someone both competent enough to make the diagnosis and accountable to the patient for that diagnosis. Any intervention (or treatment) that followed must be based on the diagnosis. The analysis of the type of cases and their treatments in the health system is referred to as “casemix analysis” and a great deal of effort goes into this analysis in the health system.[3] Dr Sammut claims to have enough knowledge of casemix analysis and hospital policy to determine that money is “wasted” on administration rather than patient care[4]. Yet he claims the opposite in the Child Protection system and suggests that when 30% of the money is spent on lawyers and 60% on foster care – means that the remaining 10% for family support is too much.
Alecomm disagrees with Dr Sammut. We are glad the hospitals do not run as Child Protection does and considers 10% as too much emphasis on the patient.
Here at Alecomm we would like to see a shift in the Child Protection system to ensure that, like practice currently in the medical system, the intervention is only performed after a competent analysis of the situation and diagnosis of the problems. Further we would advocate that any intervention must be based on that analysis and must be made in the “best interests of the child” rather than the current departmental KPIs.
In upcoming Chapters of “In the best interests of the child” we will detail why the current focus of Child Protection interventions is not the interests of the children and the changes necessary to two key pieces of legislation to enable the system to enable the focus to be on the interests of the children.
We hope you enjoyed this chapter, and encourage you to leave comments in the section below.
Comments
Why doesn't Jeremy Sammut interview some of the Fogotten Australians_Sto len Generation_Forc ed Adoption Victims or Child Migrants...bett er still ..some of New Stolen Generation Victims that are being drugged up to the hilt on Narcotic based drugs better known as Ritinol ETC.
The word is out that NSW Child Protection has bounty lists and quotas to fill ..for children in state care NSW today are huge commodities for the ABUSERS of the past ... Catholic Church ETC .
Jeremy Sammut needs to get into the real picture of what is truly happening in Child Protection today... instead of relying on the Dpt's Propaganda machine that is so well oiled it never stops spinning.
Jeremy Sammut ...What a JOKE !!!!!!!!!!