Child Care & Protection Agency highly understaffed

The understaffed Child Care and Protection Agency (CCPA) finds it difficult to conduct its duties as a result of its present shortage of staffers. This was related on Monday during the Agency’s open day by its Director, Ann Greene.

“We don’t have enough, we never get enough, there’s no place that ever get enough Child Protection Officers and all of that, but we are tying our services with the community. Every adult is a child protector,” she explained.
Care Centres Manager Melissa Gentle, who is tasked with the responsibility of caring for children who are in Government’s residential care centres, said that while the centres were equipped with all the supplies they need, they were also plagued by the shortage of staff.
“The area for improvement would be staff. That’s usually a cry for most of our departments. We need staff to help us with the children; that would be the only need so far,” she underscored.
Gentle noted that the Care Centres usually accepted volunteers, whose numbers were generally high at this time of the year as University students become busy with practicals.
In addition, she noted that at this time of the year too, persons would generally visit the Centres more often to donate clothes and toys among other things as the Christmas season neared.
The Director jumped in on that note and pointed out the importance of not only having a good quantity of staff but quality staff.
According to her, the services being offered by the Agency require ‘special people’ with a genuine love for the job, rather than someone seeking to fill their wallets.
Nonetheless, she noted that owing to understaffing, workers were not always available to investigate every reported case of child abuse immediately.
“We got a lot of complaints and the thing is I tell people with making complaints, people call in the hotline and they say that we ain’t come and I say well keep calling and people actually ask me ‘why we got to keep calling’. If you (are) serious about calling and you want the call to have an action, well I would stay on it until I get action. That shows your level of commitment,” the Director explained.
According to her, because of its staff complement, the Agency is now left to prioritise the complaints it would have received. “You might call and tell me that a child ain’t going to school, but then I have to look at all the calls I got here and there’s one that saying children left in a house without food, so it means we got to go to that one.”
She assured that such circumstances did not mean that the other case would not be looked in to – just at a later date.