Alberta child intervention services in 'crisis': union

The Zebra Child and Youth Advocacy Centre in Edmonton helps support children who have been victims of abuse.

There is a "crisis situation" developing in child intervention services in Alberta that could put children at risk, and workers say it’s being created by a government hiring practice.

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In the Town of High Level, there are currently no child intervention practitioners, said Sandra Azocar, Alberta Union of Provincial Employees (AUPE) vice-president for the northern region. Staff as far away as Westlock have had to step in to cover cases in the area on top of their existing workload.

With resources stretched thin, workers fear families won’t get the services they need, or that children could be left in unsafe environments.

"When you have that many cases on your caseload, you can't thoroughly help families the way that we should be doing. But rather you’re just putting out fires and making sure that kids are safe," Azocar said.

Hiring policy

Since the Government of Alberta introduced a "growth model" hiring policy in 2022, intended to address chronic staff shortages, Azocar said situations like the one in northern Alberta have become increasingly common.

"If anything, (the hiring policy) has created a system where people are leaving, and experienced workers are leaving in droves. Because, not only do they have to manage their own caseloads, they also have to mentor and teach those individuals that are coming on. And then those individuals that are coming on are expected to do so much more work, but also they are not being compensated appropriately."

Child intervention practitioners are employed by Children and Family Services to investigate and assess reports of children in vulnerable or dangerous situations.

The government’s new hiring policy lowered education requirements for the position to bolster recruitment, hiring people with certificates that take only ten months of education instead of a bachelor’s degree in social work or related field. People with certificates are also required to have an appropriate level of previous experience in the field to qualify, a spokesperson for Children and Family Services said.

Azocar said new workers are paid less, despite being tasked with the same workload, and are put in difficult situations without the appropriate training or experience, sometimes being asked "to do more than they're potentially legally able to do."

Once hired, child intervention practitioners go through specialized "delegation" training to prepare them for the legal and court related aspects of the job, which can include the power to enter someone’s home, remove children from precarious situations, or apply for temporary guardianship.

New hires have taken more time to complete the training since the change in hiring practice, Azocar said, and are "doing case work that you shouldn't be doing without that delegation" or requiring senior staff assistance to complete the case work.

Requests to interview the Minister of Children and Family Services (CFS), Searle Turton, were declined.

Workforce challenges

In an emailed statement, Turton’s press secretary, Ashli Barrett, said the ministry "is focused on addressing workforce challenges, including undertaking a number of initiatives to bolster recruitment, retention and support of existing staff."

The province has caseload benchmarks for front-line staff, but currently 40 per cent of child intervention practitioners’ caseloads exceed this benchmark, Barrett confirmed.

"Adjustments are made as needed based on caseload size and complexity," she said, adding that caseload benchmarks have been reduced within the last fiscal year.

Earlier this year, CFS employees complained that their workloads were causing delays in seeing children and ensuring they were safe with their guardians. The CBC reported that in mid-February, there were over 561 counts of overdue face-to-face visits with children in Alberta.

Barrett did not say how many vacant child intervention practitioner positions there are within CFS. The department posts and fills jobs as fast as possible, she said, and approximately 450 child intervention practitioners were hired in 2022 and 2023.

The turnover rate for staff in that role was between 30–40 per cent during the same period, Azocar noted.

"Four years ago, there was a staff of more than 45 in Medicine Hat, including seven teams of five or six practitioners, plus supervisors and intake workers. There are now only 18 staff," Curtis Jackson, AUPE vice-president for the southern region, said in a news release.

"The government claimed this change in hiring was to address recruitment and retention issues. Had they consulted the front-line workers, we would have told them that lowering standards and qualifications would fail."

According to Jackson, five veterans have left the department in recent months and remaining staff have been burning out and forced to take time off sick.

Before taking a management role within the union, Azocar started her career as a child intervention practitioner in 1987. Because it is a high intensity job, staff attrition has consistently been a problem, so much so that it is normal for as much as half of the workforce to have two years’ experience or less, she said.

"We get to see, sometimes, the worst of what humans can do to each other. And we're not considered first responders, although we enter homes when things are in incredible crisis. There's a lot of things that kind of work against the workers that provide these services," she said.

"When you add the fact that we have an employer that hasn't been willing to listen to our concerns, then it just creates more of a situation that – I can't reinforce this enough – has reached a critical point."

If nothing changes, more children and families will fall through the cracks, and "we’re going to see more serious outcomes when it comes to the safety of children," she said.

The union has said it requested a meeting with Minister Turton to discuss a human resources plan to address short staffing and retention, but the offer was declined because of ongoing collective bargaining.

"As these are matters being discussed at the collective bargaining table, and out of respect of the negotiation process, Minister Turton won’t meet at this time but is well aware of their concerns," Barrett said.

The Office of the Child and Youth Advocate did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.