Wednesday, June 17, 2015

[Orange County] O.C. Watchdog: Child abuse calls to hotline rise, but so do dropped calls


Blog Note: This article references a prior grand jury report.
A call came in to the child abuse hotline: The neighbors keep an autistic child caged in their home.
The social worker who took that call relayed the information to the Anaheim Police Department. Officers went to a South Garrett Street house and found a large pet cage with a mattress and bedding inside, and they arrested the 11-year-old boy’s parents on suspicion of felony child endangerment and false imprisonment.
The parents were not criminally charged, but that incident last summer showed the system working as intended. An alarming amount of the time it does not work at all, however, with more than one of every four callers to the child and elder abuse hotline hanging up before a social worker can talk to them, according to an investigation by the Orange County grand jury.
That’s dangerous and unacceptable, concluded the report released Wednesday.
“(T)he primary cause for dropped calls was the long waiting time experienced by the caller,” the grand jury said. “Some callers choose to hang up rather than continue to remain on hold. Of particular concern are callers, such as neighbors or family acquaintances, who may have mixed feelings about getting involved in the first place. If they hang up in frustration because no one is responding, they may never call again. This could result in a child being left in jeopardy, and ultimately harmed or even suffering fatal injuries.”
The Child Abuse Registry hotline, run by the county Social Services Agency, had a huge increase in calls in the course of a single year – from 43,888 calls in 2013 to 59,676 in 2014. That’s an average of 164 calls a day, or more than one every 10 minutes.
The increase in calls can be chalked up to merging an “adult protective services” hotline with the child abuse hotline, the grand jury said. But the rising volume doesn’t explain the problem.
Dropped calls exceeded 25 percent in some months of 2014, after being as low as 5 percent in preceding years.
The main culprit may be a new practice started in the spring of 2013, the grand jury said. Before then, when a hotline social worker concluded that a call didn’t rise to the level of abuse, that contact was finished.
Now, however, social workers must document all calls, even if those calls don’t result in investigations.
The new procedure requires more time and paperwork, and social workers don’t take new calls while finishing up the old ones.
The county has 90 days to respond in writing. Meantime, the Social Services Agency said it recognizes the problem and “has been analyzing data and trends as well as consulting with other Southern California county registries to identify ways to improve the rate and speed of answered calls,” said spokeswoman Jean Pasco in a statement.
It is taking action, including hiring 10 new social workers and two new supervisors to man the hotline. In the past three months, dropped calls have not exceeded 4 percent, Pasco said.
Everyone needs to be more nimble at multitasking, putting down paperwork to grab calls as they come in, the grand jury said. Supervisors have to pick up the phone when there aren’t enough social workers, and the county needs to beef up staffing.
Whatever the reason, many reports of child abuse are not being heard, the grand jury said. Ultimately, the key is for management “to commit to having staff do whatever is reasonably necessary to improve responses to incoming calls,” it said.
Although the new paperwork requirements and the combined hotlines may explain some of the dropped calls, the problem isn’t new. It dates back at least 20 years, when the 1994 grand jury blasted the county over the same issue. Since then, the county has installed a sophisticated new telephone system and hired additional staff.
“The percentage of dropped calls ebbs and flows, but the problem persists,” the grand jury said.
June 10, 2015
Orange County Register
By Teri Sforza, Staff Writer

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