Engagement with Front-line Staff

The OAG's engagement with CPWs also showed that front-line staff continue to face significant pressures, particularly in their workloads, which in turn negatively impacts children in care, whether through high staff turnover, duties "falling through the cracks," or in administrative burdens demanding CPWs' limited time. The committee heard of one employee assigned to complete, by themselves, quality assurance reviews of roughly 3,000 child protection decisions. This is not sustainable.

The department has used various methods to reach out to staff, including teleconferences, meetings, and surveys. Over the next two years and into the future, all staff must have the opportunity to provide free and honest feedback, whether positive or negative. An open, ongoing process with guaranteed anonymity is one way to achieve this.

Recommendation 10

The Standing Committee on Government Operations recommends that the Department of Health and Social Services develop and implement mechanisms to enable staff to provide free and honest feedback anonymously.

Specific Observations

Services for Children in Parental Care

Structured Decision Making

Structured Decision Making (SDM) is a proprietary tool intended to aid CPWs in making decisions about child safety and to ensure consistency in decision-making. It is relatively new to the Northwest Territories. Although it is in use, it is not yet fully implemented.

The OAG found that in about eight of every 10 case reviews, CPWs did not use the SDM tool to assess longer-term risk for children in parental care, even though this was mandatory and risk assessment was an outstanding performance issue. The OAG also found insufficient staff training and significant lag in internal quality assurance. As discussed earlier, in one case a single employee was tasked with reviewing 3,000 decisions in addition to their regular job duties.

Further, a review commissioned by the department and undertaken by the National Council on Crime and Delinquency Children's Research Center, who created SDM, found a 50 percent error rate. This means that the tool's creators, experts in their field, disagreed with one in every two decisions made by a territorial CPW on a child's safety using SDM. This is not an acceptable standard of reliability.

Plan-of-Care Agreements

Plan-of-care agreements (POCAs) are used where CPWs have established that a child is in an unsafe situation, but may remain in parental care under conditions tailored to address that situation. POCAs set out these conditions and "the support needed to help parents meet [them]."

As discussed, the OAG found that compliance rates for the management and monitoring of POCAs had declined since 2014. Children rarely received the services due to them, and some POCAs were continued even where parents failed to meet conditions. In some instances, CPWs "allowed a parent to terminate the [POCA] early without being assured that the child was no longer at risk."

The committee is concerned that, whether intentionally or not, as our predecessor committee warned, reductions in the number of child apprehensions may have been "achieved by cutting back on child protection services." The committee supports the general objective of limiting the number of apprehensions, but this cannot be achieved at the expense of children's right to a safe living environment or the department's compliance with its legal responsibilities.

Now I pass on the reading to the Member for Nunakput.