CHILD SAFETY BLOW

THE state government is pulling all funding from a long-running child safety program that is helping to protect 537 vulnerable Gold Coast children and families from potentially violent situations.

Gold Coast Health will save $2.6m by absorbing the 11-year Home Visiting Program (HVP) into existing services because it is deemed a “financial risk”. However, demand is already at breaking point.

THE state government is pulling all funding from a long-running child safety program that is helping to protect 537 vulnerable Gold Coast children and families from potentially violent situations.

Gold Coast Health will save itself $2.6m by absorbing the 11-year Home Visiting Program (HVP) into existing services because it is deemed a “financial risk”.

However, a leaked document to the Bulletin reveals the demand is already at breaking point and comes in a climate of unprecedented domestic violence and children as young as 10 carrying knives, regularly stealing cars and youth gang thuggery on public transport.

Previous Bulletin investigations have revealed taxpayers are coughing up on average $500,000 a year for residential care kids, only for them to join street gangs and be babysat in police station corridors.

A source says staff involved in community child health are “horrified at the impact of what is being proposed” and there’s a “huge amount of understandable stress and anxiety”.

“There will be huge numbers of the most complex and vulnerable families on the Gold Coast who will lose this vital service,” the insider said.

“There is acknowledgment in the document that services needing to attempt to absorb these vulnerable families are already at full capacity. It’s basically abandoning these very vulnerable families and expecting other already overburdened services to pick up the slack.”

A change.org petition, Save the Gold Coast Community Child Health Home Visiting Programme, has been set up by health workers to protest against the axing of the service. It says health authorities have “started work to reduce the program, although the clients have not yet been informed”.

Set up in 2010, the Home Visiting Program was designed to “prevent child safety risk and ultimately, child protection involvement”.

Through home visits, child health nurses provide sustained support for the “Gold Coast’s most complex and vulnerable young families” from birth until two years of age.

Based within the Gold Coast Hospital and Health Service (GCHHS) and Children’s Health Queensland, the program was funded by the Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs at a cost of $2.5m a year. As of June 9, 537 children and their families were receiving services through the program.

In December last year,

Gold Coast Health learned that the department would cease recurrent funding from June 30. On June 8, after six months of “ongoing correspondence”, all parties involved failed to secure longterm permanent funding. GCHHS stopped taking referrals to the HVP on June 14.

It is understood staff would be absorbed into Gold Coast Health as part of the “organisational change”.

When discussing the HVP program, the document refers to it as a “$2.6m financial risk” for GCHHS, including a “substantive permanent workforce” of 30 staff.

A Gold Coast Health spokeswoman said while the “Home Visitation Program” would no longer be available, “our community child health team will still offer a range of support programs to ensure families receive appropriate levels of health care”.

“Our team of child health nurses will continue to provide parenting strategies and support for parents either at a community health centre or in the home, as appropriate, and will continue to work in partnership with other key community agencies to ensure families are linked to any additional supportive services,” she said.

“The funding was allocated to Gold Coast Health and Children’s Health Queensland, with the program available to families living in the Gold Coast, Logan, Beenleigh and Browns Plains areas. It has always been understood the funding contract was to end on 30 June.”

A spokesman for the Department of Children, Youth Justice and Multicultural Affairs said various forms of the program had been delivered since it started in 2010. It confirmed the contract for the current service model, which started in 2018, would end on June 30 so it could redirect “that funding to other priority areas”.

“More specifically, this will include the expansion of foster and kinship care services for children in care. These supports and services are a vital part of keeping children and young people safe when they can no longer live safely at home.

“Residents of the Gold Coast will continue to have access to the usual range of child and maternal health services available to families across the state.”

It’s understood the department does not fund home-visiting services anywhere in the state.