Extra staff, on-call roster help reduce wait time to make report to Child Abuse Report Line
AN injection of 21 extra staff into the call centre fielding reports of suspected child abuse and neglect has slashed average wait times for concerned callers.
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AN injection of 21 extra staff into the call centre fielding reports of suspected child abuse and neglect has slashed average wait times for callers.
Making workers available overnight through an on-call roster and trialling a call-back system also has contributed to the average wait time falling from about 42 minutes last financial year to about 12 minutes.
Authorities began trialling a call-back feature in April but the full system was not in place until the start of this month.
The Child Protection Department is analysing its impact but was not able to tell The Advertiser how many people had taken up the call-back option or how long it took staff to return their call.
A spokeswoman said the department was monitoring the system and expected, by mid next month, to have “enough data to conduct meaningful analysis of the workability of the call-back feature”. “During the trial of the system we detected a number of improvements that we were able to make. We anticipate this will lead to a further reduction in call wait times,” she said.
The Advertiser has previously reported callers waiting as long as seven hours to reach the hotline call centre.
In her 2016 Royal Commission report former judge Margaret Nyland recommended the Government take steps to reduce the maximum wait time to 30 minutes and introduce a call-back feature to respond within two hours.
In June last year, The Advertiser reported the former Labor Government was negotiating with a private company to provide the call-back service for the Child Abuse Report Line. Labor had committed almost $20 million to recruiting extra staff and updating call centre operations to ensure more reports of suspected abuse or neglect were addressed quickly.
The call centre operates around the clock, every day of the year. The spokeswoman said the department had changed how it rostered staff and had begun operating an “on-call roster where identified staff are available overnight if required”. Of the 21 new staff hired since November last year, eight focus on responding to emails lodged via the electronic reporting system.
There had been more than 3800 unread eCARL reports waiting to be assessed early last year, but the backlog has been cut to about 270.