Explosion in reporting

This is rather astonishing;

Dr Wills expected 2500 Hawke's Bay youngsters would be referred to social welfare services this year, 300 of them by the hospital.

2,500 children represents around 15 percent of the children living in the Hastings and Central Hawks Bay district. If that percentage were extrapolated across the country we would be looking at over 130,000 children being referred to social welfare. To put that into context as it stands last year around 16,000 children were receiving social work services.

Hawke's Bay health board's development of a strategy to tackle the region's high rate of child and domestic violence had worked so well that levels of reporting had rocketed.

But how many of those reports are substantiated? The level of reporting on its own says nothing.

The strategy, called the Hawke's Bay Family Intervention Programme, had proven so successful it is to be launched nationwide tomorrow by the Health Ministry.

So this scheme is being rolled out nationwide and we will measure its success by sky-rocketing reports. But where the heck are the resources coming from to deal with all these reports? DHBs are constantly stretched, there is a shortage of social workers and GPs and fosterers. The courts are stretched. The jails and youth lock-ups are full.

Success should be measured by a reversal of all of these, not sky-rocketing reports.