Katherine child protection workers are still carrying the highest caseloads in the Northern Territory.
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Territory Families Minister Dale Wakefield said the government finds it hard to recruit and keep staff in Katherine.
She said the Katherine had a long history of high staff turnover.
Despite the problem being highlighted by the NT Royal Commission in 2016, the Katherine office remains under stress.
Ms Wakefield told a NT Estimates hearing yesterday Katherine’s problem was “difficult”.
“It has had a long history of staff turnover. I was there several weeks ago and visited people and I think there was some struggling there,” she said.
Katherine’s 23 staff have a case load of 783, with an average number of 34 cases.
In comparison in Alice Springs there are 40 staff with total assigned cases of 1193, an average case held of 30 per person.
In Darwin there are 76 staff with 2268 total assigned cases for an average of 30.
Ms Wakefield said Territory Families continues to provide extra support for Katherine, by putting in extra workers to support that work force.
The hearing was told the department had “on a number of occasions” moved staff from another area to Katherine in support.
Territory Families chief executive officer Ken Davies called Katherine a “hotspot” which was difficult to recruit for.
”One of the things we are is very focussed around that Katherine office in terms of just getting in some additional support there, both from the Darwin end but also in terms of the basic building blocks of that office,” Mr Davies said.
“Making sure that when we recruit, we have actually got somebody there that welcomes the staff, goes out on the weekend and finds them a house.
“Traditionally, when a staff member was recruited to Katherine they were referred across to realestate.com to find a house.
“We know that education and health services do it differently. We are trying to line up our services to make sure staff, who are recruited, are welcomed and settled in to that office really well.
“In terms of case-loads, the average case-load there at the moment is 34 in Katherine. Last year it was around 59, it is definitely a reduction. In terms of staff, we have 53 staff on our org chart and there is actually 48 who are there at the moment. We are getting on top of the issues, it is a big regional footprint that they work out of.
“We have a new director in there and we are keeping a really close eye on it. We want people to go and live and stay there, it is important that they develop those relationships going forward.”
Mr Davies said there needed to be some spending on the Katherine office as well.
“ ... that Katherine regional office has been a hot spot for us and we are working really hard—at a management level but also in a support level for staff to really make that a better place for our people to work in—and part of that is working with the Department of Chief Minister down there, connecting our staff in a very cohesive way with health, with education and with police—and there is a big redesign, bit of work being done in Katherine around that government centre to actually front face the agency so that we have a Territory Families office that fronts out on to that central area where people can come and see them without being tucked away around the back where it is kind of this secret.”
The hearing was told there had been 18,442 total child protection reports to Territory Families to March 31 this year.
Of those, 1230 related to sexual exploitation, 3680 related to physical abuse, 5020 related to emotional abuse, and 8512 related to neglect.