A ‘lifesaving’ social care team helping Edinburgh’s most vulnerable children must be saved from being dissolved, says an Edinburgh councillor.
The team, currently at the Sick Kids in Little France, have been working cases with children with severe disability or other serious difficulties for over 30 years.
But council officers have decided to cut it – and gone over the heads of elected councillors to do so.
SNP councillor Euan Hyslop says they provide a ‘life-saving’ service in Little France, working to also provide on-call social care service for doctors and nurses concerned about young people’s well-being.
He said: “Having a social worker based in the hospital means that anyone who has a concern about the welfare of a child can contact social services, and get them to intervene quickly.
“In some cases, those can be lifesaving interactions. If social workers aren’t there, and they get removed, then the alternative for these doctors or nurses or whoever is to try and ring up a social worker based in the city in a different team, and ask the social care to come out and intervene.
“By that time, the child may have left the hospital and that really crucial intervention for the really vulnerable children, the opportunity for that would have disappeared, have gone.”
Considerations about cutting the team were first made after a review into children’s services in the council was concluded in August.
Notably, the period for staff and other concerned parties to participate in a consultation about the review overlapped significantly with the summer school holidays.
At an education committee meeting on September 2, councillors unanimously voted to have council officers present a report to them if a proposal to be made to cut the social work team.
But, the next day, the city’s childcare directorate told councillors that the social workers would be removed without a report being presented and assigned to other teams.
And, despite leaving the hospital with no social care presence, the officers said it would cause “no loss of resource and no loss of service”.
The team also provide support to the maternity hospital at the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, as well as the CAMHS service there.
Cllr Hyslop has now put forward a motion to the next full Edinburgh Council meeting, to be held next Thursday.
If supported by councillors, it will direct council chief executive Paul Lawrence to launch an internal review of the decision to axe the service without consulting service.
It would also ask that a ‘governance and review process’ be established to avoid similar conflicts coming up in future.
Around 10 social workers currently make up the team, which was set up in response to poor health outcomes for mothers who were homeless or facing domestic violence in the Capital.
Cllr Hyslop added: “They are distinct from social workers based in the city. The remit for them is to work with the most medically complex children and young people in Edinburgh.
“The families of children who attend special school, who have mental, life limiting, severe, complex medical needs, part of their routine is seeing social workers in hospital.
“It’s not just for the sick kids – it’s in addition to work with homeless pregnant women who get support through the team.
“It’s a serious background step for these women if these services are to be removed from the hospital.”
He said social workers stationed at the hospital often help families in a range of areas in their work.
For example, they can help parents deal with paperwork and grant applications while they are dealing with the day-to-day difficulties of their child’s illness.
And they can help advocate for them in a healthcare system that is often difficult to navigate.
Speaking on the decision of the children’s care directorate, Cllr Hyslop said: “It is outlandish to me to say that that’s not going to have an impact on service.
“I don’t understand how they can possibly come to that conclusion. But even if they are coming to that conclusion, there has to be a way in which councillors are able to challenge it.”
Edinburgh’s children’s social care is under the directorate of Education, Children and Families.
By Joseph Sullivan Local Democracy Reporter
The Local Democracy Reporting Service (LDRS) is a public service news agency. It is funded by the BBC, provided by the local news sector (in Edinburgh that is Reach plc (the publisher behind Edinburgh Live and The Daily Record) and used by many qualifying partners. Local Democracy Reporters cover news about top-tier local authorities and other public service organisations.
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