Dunedin Child, Youth and Family social workers will be told they are expected to go and pick up young people who run away from care, after a review of the agency's policies and procedures around absconding.
CYF operations manager for Otago-Southland Judy Larking said the review was conducted internally and with police after a 14-year-old in CYF's care in Dunedin ran away at least 43 times in 14 weeks.
After a meeting with police on Monday to clarify responsibilities around absconders from CYF care, she said social workers in the region would be told that if they received information about where a missing child was, they were expected to go an pick them up, unless the situation was too risky, in which case they should call police for assistance.
They had always made calls to try to locate absconders, shared information with police and sometimes went out looking for them, but the review "strengthened our understanding and expectations" around their responsibilities.
It also tied in nicely with a regional project, started before the 14-year-old girl ran away so many times, that looked at how to better support social workers working with an increasing number of children with challenging behaviour, she said.
There are 20 CYF social workers in Dunedin who look after 160 children in care.
In the case of the recidivist runaway, social workers had been doing good work with her, but had not looked at the big picture, Mrs Larking said.
She said the project looked at putting in place processes around what to do if a child absconded more than twice, for example, meeting other agencies to discuss how the behaviour might be changed.
If the social worker felt they had exhausted all local options, a regional panel of advisers could offer their support, and look at how the resources available across the whole region could be best used to address the problem.
The agency was also looking at using staff from residential homes - where children are held at secure sites - to assist with the more complex young people in family homes.
"They are really happy to work with us and support us, more so than has happened in the past, and their specialist knowledge will be really helpful."
She said a five-bed supervised group family home, similar to a group family home but supervised around the clock by paid CYF staff, was opening in Invercargill next month.
Dunedin was comparatively well off in terms of CYF homes and there was only enough funding for 12 of the new homes nationally, so the choice was to put it in Invercargill.
Mrs Larking said CYF considered itself the parent when a child was put in its care, and it had all the responsibilities of a parent.
The ideal was to place a child in a home near their family or other supports, but sometimes no beds were available in or near a young person's home town, or what was available was inappropriate.
A home might be full of boys, for example, and they needed a place for a girl, or individuals needed to be kept apart, or the right supports were not available for that person in that place.
The recidivist runaway's grandmother first publicly raised the problem with her granddaughter because she did not know how else to get CYF to deal with the girl, who she felt was a bad influence on her daughter. The two girls are the same age.
She said yesterday it was unsatisfactory social workers were now being asked to track missing children, when she had been asking them to do that for more than two years.
It was too late for her own daughter, who was now in CYF's custody in Christchurch.
"If they had got [her granddaughter] like I'd asked them to, I might still have control of my daughter."
She also wanted to know why her daughter was not placed in a home nearer her family.
"If they want to take these kids, they should have space for them or give more support to the family so the kid can stay at home as long as possible and be taken away as a last resort."
