Foster parents forced into Russian roulette

ON an otherwise normal Thursday night last May, an Adelaide social worker marched into Kay Hackett's home, put a foster baby down on the floor, and started unpacking the baby's things.

ON an otherwise normal Thursday night last May, an Adelaide social worker marched into Kay Hackett's home, put a foster baby down on the floor, and started unpacking the baby's things.

"The baby was in a capsule. I was just looking down at him, thinking, 'What an honour to care for you', when I heard her say: 'Here are the nappies. Here's the formula, and here's the morphine'," Ms Hackett said.

"I just went into panic mode. I thought, morphine? Is she kidding? She handed me this bottle of clear liquid, with these syringes, and she said, 'You'll have to administer this to the baby every four hours'."

Ms Hackett, who has been a foster mum for six years and has three adult children and five grandchildren of her own, says her eyes "just bugged out of my head".

"I said, 'This baby, this four-week-old baby, is addicted to drugs? And I'm going to administer the morphine? I don't have any training for this'."

Ms Hackett said Families SA - the state government department that oversees foster placements in South Australia - did not warn her the baby was drug-addicted, or train her in how to administer the morphine.

For six weeks in May and June, she lived in fear of overdosing the baby, especially as she became so sleep-deprived "from this little baby just screaming and screaming and screaming. His legs would quiver and he'd shake and throw up his milk".

"I said to the case worker, 'What if I make a mistake? What if I give him too much?' And she said: 'Well, at least he'll sleep through the night'."

Ms Hackett's case comes to light on the eve of the National Foster Care Conference to be held in Adelaide this weekend.

She is one of thousands of foster parents who claim the system is in crisis.

The national president of the Foster Care Association, Ken Abery, said: "We had 14,000 foster carers five years ago, and now we've only got 9000. The numbers are just dropping away and it's because foster carers feel like they are treated with disrespect."

Nina Weston, who fostered children for more than 30 years and now runs a group called Children in Crisis, said: "It's Russian roulette. Children are just being shuttled from one home to the next.

"Nobody listens to the foster parents. They might care for a foster child for three or four years, and then the social workers turn up and say, 'This child is going back to some family member'.

"Mostly it doesn't work, so off the child goes, to a different set of foster parents. There's no way anybody could say the system is working properly."

"They're not supposed to know the baby's history. They are just treated terribly."

Ms Hackett said she had initially agreed to provide foster care for the baby's three-year-old brother. "Then the social workers rang and said: 'Can you take the baby, too?' And I believe children should stay together so I said yes, of course.

"And when she said: 'Here's the morphine', I just blurted out: 'Morphine?' I was horrified."

Ms Hackett said she was told to extract a small amount of liquid morphine from the bottle, using a syringe and squirt the drug into the baby's mouth.

After three days of near-constant screaming, Ms Hackett said she called the baby's pediatrician, who had told her, "Don't worry, mothers do this all the time".

"So obviously it's a very common thing - drugged mothers are sent home with babies and morphine."

The baby went "cold turkey" after six weeks, Ms Hackett said. "He went through terrible withdrawal. He was shaking, quivering, screaming.

"I couldn't walk around, holding him all day. I had to do the cooking and the housework, so I had to put him down, and sometimes I just had to let him scream."

She said she asked department staff: "If I mess up and make a mistake, will you stand by me? Or is the onus on me? And they said, 'Whatever happens, happens'."

Ms Hackett said she ultimately gave up caring for the baby, which is now believed to be back with his mother and three-year-old brother.

"Afterwards, I said to my family: 'No, that's it, I won't do this again'. But somebody has to do it, and I feel I can pour love into these children.

"The big thing for me is, I want these children out of the system. The baby needed to be in a hospital, but I was told, 'Don't worry, it's all normal'."