South Australian child protection staff say vulnerable children may be at greater risk because the case-management system they are using keeps crashing.
The Public Service Association (PSA) said it received numerous complaints from Department for Child Protection (DCP) staff saying the Connected Client and Case Management System, known as "C3MS", was not working.
Some staff said the critical tool – which collates case notes and other information and shares them between colleagues and departments — was entirely unavailable to hundreds of staff last Thursday and Friday, March 2 and 3.
The department denied the system was completely inaccessible on those days but acknowledged there were some problems.
"Some users experienced intermittent unavailability of C3MS on Thursday and Friday," the department said in a statement.
"DCP is working on the issues and has identified and implemented measures to optimise the system's performance."
Longstanding issue in department
The ABC has been told the system is outdated and frequently crashes.
Child protection staff said the recent failures prevented them from properly assessing the risk to vulnerable children and families when they received child protection reports, because they could not access case notes or other historical information.
"They've been having problems with this particular software for quite some time, however of late the problems have just become completely unworkable," PSA general secretary Natasha Brown said.
"We have regular outages, the system is regularly crashing and [it is] making it impossible for our members to do their work."
The union said the outages affected the ability of staff to meet court deadlines and also affected other departments, such as Youth Justice, a division of the Department of Human Services.
"Our members are very concerned that if they're not able to access the system and the up-to-date information, then there will be children and families who could be placed at risk," Ms Brown said.
The union said it was concerned the longstanding problems with C3MS had not been addressed and questioned whether the department had a plan to upgrade the system.
The department said it was working on an upgrade.
"The recent Mal Hyde Review recognised that the department's Connected Client and Case Management System (C3MS) was not meeting its needs," it said in a statement.
"The Department has prepared a business case for government about how the system can be improved."
South Australia's embattled child protection system has been frequently criticised and has been the subject of multiple reviews and a royal commission.
The state government recently committed $26.7 million to elements of the system in response to two recent reviews.
