Six years after the Keating Report was commissioned would seem an appropriate time to assess how the recommendations of that report have changed the situation in Jamaican children's homes, places of safety and state agencies.
Recommendation 21 of the Keating Report says that every child currently in a place of safety or children's home should have a complete physical/psychological/educational evaluation. This should include detailed information about the family of the child, the child's medical history, medical examina-tion with laboratory tests as ordered by a physician, psychiatric evaluation, psycho-educational evaluation if warranted and the child's school history.
When this newspaper contacted the Child Development Agency, it said that some six years after the report, it had managed to mobilise and implement all (Keating Report) recommendations, with varying levels of completion and success.
However, speaking with The Gleaner yesterday, Leroy Anderson, director of the Jamaica National Children's Home (JNCH), said that while the facility has long been on the same wavelength as some recommendations of the Keating Report, there is sometimes a financial challenge in complying with aspects of recommendation 21.
Always a challenge
Clearly stating that every resident at the JNCH goes through a complete physical assessment on admission and that a medical doctor visits and carries out routine checks on residents of the special care unit once weekly, Anderson admitted that "there is always a challenge to access some specialist services such as physiotherapy and occupational therapy, which are extremely expensive." He continued that the costs of these treatments are "mostly out of reach of JNCH as a charitable organisation".
He said that the home is sometimes able to access funds by way of donation from sponsors for specific cases. However, for the most part, they have specialists provide workshops to the caregivers, who, after training, execute specific basic activities according to the needs of residents.
The director continued that the Department of Sociology, Psychology and Social Work at the University of the West Indies has assisted the home in completing a psycho-educational assessment for the majority of their children while others have been completed using specialists in private practice.
Tough call
Anderson conceded: "I am not sure how closely private children's home will be able to consistently follow these recommendations considering that every recom-mendation requires an injection of funds towards execution." He added: "With the stingy main-tenance from Government and the dwindling assistance from corpo-rate Jamaica, we are facing a tough call."
Similar sentiments were echoed when The St John Bosco Boys Home in Manchester was contacted. Administrator at the facility, Sister Susan Fraser, said children at the home have been evaluated. In most medical cases, she notes, this is done by medical professionals who volunteer their valuable time and services at no charge.
She noted that if the home had to pay for the services consistently, it would cost a very hefty sum, which may be hard to find, especially with small government support.
On the brighter side, both homes report having a ward to caregiver ratio of below 10:1, a figure set out in recommendation 30 of the report as being necessary for the provision of acceptable standards of care for each child.