Minister Susan Close says not all of the phone calls that are swamping the Child Protection Agency are ones the department should be looking at.
She said the SA health, police and education departments would work within the “multi-agency front door that we are going to set up”.
“Really child protection agency is about going out, looking at the kids and seeing if we need to remove them, and not every phone call requires that kind of response,” she said.
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She said the agency was up to 67,000 contacts, but only 20,000 were “screened-in” — which meant they were cases that belonged in the department.
“You see this kind of winnowing down of a large number of contacts that are making their way to us, but not necessarily what we want to be hearing.
“It’s not necessarily what the child protection agency should be looking at.”
But she said the agency was looking to employ 20 additional fulltime staff.
“The problem really is that we have 74 staff working there and we have escalating number of people making contact.”
On Thursday night The Advertiser reported that more than 14,000 calls to reports suspected child abuse had gone unanswered in the past six months.
