Thank you, Mr. Speaker. My questions are for the Minister of Health and Social Services. During my time back home, I have had a couple of concerns brought to my attention, and I have worked with the Minister. I thank him and his department for working with me on that. My first question is: is there a policy to guide social service workers when a parent, foster parent, or concerned citizens alert authorities of a missing child under the care of the director of Child and Family Services? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. Minister of Health and Social Services.
Mr. Speaker, yes, there are some standards in place to guide staff in the event of a child or youth who goes missing. One of the standards that we have is based on serious incidents. This standard provides direction to staff to ensure that they take required actions to address a serious incident, that they contact the RCMP where required, that they seek medical attention for a child or youth where required, and provide verbal and written notification to the director.
Serious incidents do have a range that are identified within the standards from 1 to 4, and, as a note, if a child under five were to go missing or be away from their placement without authorization for any more than three hours, they would actually be considered a priority 1, so we would engage the standards immediately.
We also have some standards in place, Mr. Speaker, for when an individual is out of territory in a placement. This standard provides direction to staff on how to initiate an alert both within the Northwest Territories and outside the Northwest Territories, in the jurisdiction where a person is placed. So, yes, Mr. Speaker, in short, we do have standards in place to address exactly these situations.
Can the Minister advise us: how is the child's safety addressed when they are reported missing? I think the Minister kind of elaborated a little bit in the first question, but maybe get a little bit more elaboration on this one.
When a child is under the care and custody of the CFS system, the director is in a sense the parent of the child, the de facto parent, and the director does have the ability to provide some responsibilities in this area through child protection workers within the system.
The practice expectation when a child or a youth does go missing is that the child protection working is to take all measures required to locate the child. This includes, obviously, things like questioning last-known contacts of the child or youth; seeking out possible locations that the child or youth have visited or regularly visits; searching for a child or youth at those locations, both directly in person and in collaboration with other known acquaintances, foster parents, and the RCMP. So multiple individuals can be engaged in this.
Child protection services training actually includes training in these exact standards so that individuals know what their expectations are and know how to respond to this. We did just get audited. We have acknowledged that we need to do better in many of the areas, and we are enhancing training in many areas, including this area, to make sure that our staff know what they need to do when one of the children in care does go missing.
Can the Minister tell us what the department is doing to ensure social workers are aware of the standards and are using them to guide their practice in such situations?
The training I mentioned in my last response is currently being enhanced, and we are in the process of developing a more stringent training framework. We are expanding the length of the training from two months to three months, and we are designing new training processes that include a combination of in-class study, structured self-study, and supervision, ensuring that our staff are appropriately trained and that they are competent in the knowledge and the skills that they need prior to employment as child protection workers, so we are trying to do a lot of this work up front, before we actually appoint them as child protection workers.
Social workers in our system are not all child protection workers. Only those who have received designation and have certain specific training are, so we are trying to do more of that up front so that they have the skills to respond accordingly when those unfortunate situations do occur.
Oral questions. Member for Nahendeh.
Thank you, and I appreciate the information the Minister has been able to share with us here today. My final question: will the Child and Family Services quality improvement plan that is effective soon support and align with these standards and the training? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Time is meshing together. I either made a statement on that today or yesterday. I'm pretty sure it was today. The bottom line is, the quality improvement plan is a living document. We're hoping to have the document go live, reckoning that it will continue to evolve over time, but yes, it does and will include these types of things as we move forward. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you. Oral questions. Member for Yellowknife Centre.
