Problems persist with Rotherham’s care system a year after a damning report found that its failures contributed to the sexual exploitation of 1,400 children over a 16-year period, the NHS regulator has found.
In a review of how effectively health services in Rotherham are protecting children and young people, the Care Quality Commission found that they had made insufficient progress, despite the outcry after details of past lapses were made public last summer.
Prof Alexis Jay’s report last August said that from 1997 to 2013 vulnerable girls, some as young as 11, were raped, trafficked to other towns and cities in the north of England, abducted, beaten and intimidated. In just over a third of cases the victims were previously known to services because of reports of child protection issues and neglect.
The CQC’s review, published on Tuesday, found that there was a lack of understanding about roles and responsibilities in safeguarding, particularly against child sexual exploitation. It said communication between midwives and health visitors and the capacity of the school nursing service to respond were particular areas for improvement, and urged services to work more closely to protect vulnerable children.
CQC’s deputy chief inspector, Sue McMillan, said: “We’re disappointed that despite the intense scrutiny on child protection in Rotherham and the help packages that have been made available, services with a key role in child safeguarding are unclear about their responsibilities. While progress has been made, it is too slow and more is required.
“This is unacceptable and we will check progress against our recommendations. These agencies need respond quickly to this report to ensure that no child is let down by the services designed to protect them. We know from decades of inquires that things go wrong for vulnerable children when services do not work together and this is crucial in keeping children safe.”
The CQC found that children brought into the care of Rotherham social services were not receiving timely initial health assessments, and when they did take place they were not always effective and not always followed up. IHAs are important because they include an assessment of whether the child has been abused, and it is recognised that the health of children who are looked after is often worse than those who are not.
There were also cases of young people receiving inpatient mental health services who were discharged back to Rotherham without local mental health services knowing, a situation the CQC said was “unacceptable and puts vulnerable children at serious risk of harm”.
Jay’s independent inquiry was commissioned by Rotherham metropolitan borough council in October 2013 after the conviction of five men for grooming teenage girls for sex in 2010. She found that council and other officials sometimes thought youth workers were exaggerating the exploitation problem. There were also fears of being accused of racism if they talked openly about the perpetrators in the town mostly being Pakistani taxi drivers.
Sue Cassin, the chief nurse of NHS Rotherham clinical commissioning group, said: “We welcome the report from the Care Quality Commission’s visit in February 2015 and acknowledge its recommendations. The report recognised a number of areas of good practice, the progress we have made in health services and highlights areas where we recognise improvements can be made.
“Since the visit five months ago we have put in place a number of improvements as part of a multi-agency action plan that was developed by all partners across Rotherham.”
