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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-06-07 Daily Xml
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CHILD PROTECTION

In reply to Ms CHAPMAN (Bragg) (10 March 2011).

The Hon. J.M. RANKINE (Wright—Minister for Families and Communities, Minister for Housing, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Disability): The Families SA Child Abuse Report Line (CARL) does not receive notifications of alleged abuse or neglect via email, as email is not a secure mechanism to convey confidential information about children and families.

Waiting times at CARL are highly variable depending on the time of day and the volume of calls.

The most recent available data for day time CARL average call waiting times is:

January 2011—2 minutes, 54 seconds;

December 2010—4 minutes, 32 seconds; and

November 2010—9 minutes, 48 seconds.

CARL currently provides 249 mandated notifiers from health, education and police with E-Carl registration, to make their notifications via E-Carl. E-Carl is a secure electronic notification system developed to assist mandated notifiers who make very high volumes of notifications to CARL. These mandated notifiers, by virtue of their experience of making notifications, understand the nature and quality of the information that CARL requires to make a good assessment of a notification of alleged abuse or neglect.

It would be detrimental to the safety of children to allow all mandated notifiers to make their notification via E-Carl, as notifiers may omit to record critical information in their E-Notification. This would make it difficult for CARL staff to make a good assessment of the child's safety. Valuable time would be lost by CARL staff trying to contact notifiers to clarify and seek further information.

The 249 registered E-Carl users include:

74 users in the health sector across 8 different health services;

72 South Australian Police users; and

103 users in schools.

To be a registered E-Carl user, the mandated notifier must have their own individual user identification to be able to log into E-Carl. E-Carl operates within the State Government's Justice Network to ensure that the information is secure and not accessed by unauthorised persons.

Families SA is currently working in partnership with the South Australian Police to register and train more police personnel to use E-Carl. This is possible because police personnel already access the Justice Network and Families SA can target specific police personnel who are required to make high volumes of notifications to the Child Abuse Report Line.

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