The vast majority of B.C. social workers are juggling caseloads far above recommended numbers, and that is putting the lives of vulnerable children at risk, according to a report to be released today.
"The volume of work - measured by caseloads - is intolerable," says the report, Choose Children: A Case for Reinvesting in Child, Youth and Family Services in British Columbia. "Many frontline workers fear that too many children and youth will never receive the care they need."
The B.C. Government and Service Employees' Union, which represents most social workers, wrote the document and gave a copy to The Sun. Last year, former B.C. judge Ted Hughes recommended in a report on Manitoba's child welfare system that social workers carry caseloads of no more than 20 families. The Child Welfare League of America says 17.
But in B.C., the report says, a third of survey respondents were juggling between 20 and 29 cases a month.
Half had more than 30 cases a month, including 10 per cent who struggled with 70 to 180 cases a month.
And nearly one-third of survey respondents said they were also carrying a co-worker's files in addition to their own, to cover unfilled vacancies or long-term leaves.
The high caseload numbers are more common in rural or northern communities areas such as Prince Rupert, Terrace and Fort St. John, and are the most severe among workers who help children with special needs, the report says.
BCGEU president Stephanie Smith said this type of report has never been produced before, so the union cannot provide caseload numbers from past years. But, anecdotally, social workers say they have been increasing for years.
"There is a real fear they will fail an at-risk child and that there could be injuries or death," Smith said. "Our child protection and child welfare system is not working and is on the verge of collapse."
Minister of Children and Family Development Stephanie Cadieux would not comment on the report until its release today, a spokesperson said.
The union surveyed more than 3,400 child and family workers in B.C., and met with 412 of them, to conclude the system is overstretched and under-resourced. "The safety and well-being of vulnerable children and families is being compromised because the B.C. government is not committing the resources required to protect them, with desperately tragic consequences," the report states.
It recommends government restore $44 million in annual funding that has been cut during the last five years, as well as spend an additional $231 million over three years to better support special needs, mental health, child safety, family support, and adoption services.
The report also recommends hiring an additional 100 new social workers and filling 90 existing vacancies to relieve chronic understaffing.
"They have been doing child protection on the cheap for years and years, and now it is getting to the point that it doesn't work anymore," said Doug Kinna, who has been the BCGEU social worker representative for 15 years.
"Right now, social workers say (the system) is the worse it has ever been. These are longtime social workers who have been around for 20-plus years, and they've never seen it this bad."
B.C. children's representative, Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, last month pegged the ministry's budget cuts since 2008 at $100 million, adjusted for inflation. Cadieux's ministry insisted that wasn't true, arguing instead that it had merely transferred some services and their budgets to other ministries. In information provided to The Sun on Wednesday, the ministry said its budget had grown since 2008, including an extra $5 million to address caseload numbers.
But NDP children's ministry critic Doug Donaldson noted 80 per cent of workers polled by the union said their offices were under-resourced, and that in some cases untrained administrative staff were doing the work of frontline service providers. This, he argued, could lead to devastating consequences.
"Think about the impact of not servicing these children, what it means on other aspects of government services, like health, like education," he said. "It's a real lack of foresight."
Smith hopes the government will act on the report's recommendations, even though they require an increase to the children's ministry's budget. "It is a crisis issue.
We understand the government's preference towards lean, but this is lean gone mean."
Eight years ago, Hughes conducted a review of B.C.'s child welfare system, after the tragic deaths of several children, and his scathing report called for the creation of Turpel-Lafond's position. She has since reviewed files of 628 deaths and 1,555 critical injuries of children linked to the child welfare system, and has released a series of damning reports demanding more government investment.
The BCGEU report says the children's ministry provides services to about 155,000 youth each year, but those numbers are expected to increase by 27,000 kids over the next five years due to factors such as child poverty, decreased government funding for other community support programs, and increasingly complex mental illness and addiction diagnoses.
The report also noted child and family workers experience high rates of putting in free overtime, burning out, taking sick leave, and stressing about the well-being of their clients.
The workers surveyed also listed B.C.'s problem-plagued Integrated Case Management System as a top workplace concern, noting they faced hostility and violence from clients frustrated by delays in processing social assistance payments.
Turpel-Lafond referred to the case management system as a "colossal failure," and the NDP's Donaldson said the $200-million pricetag could have been better spent on child welfare services.
However, an email from the children's ministry said it is about to release the final phase of its new case management system, which will make the it "more responsive and user-friendly for social workers."
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