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Legal and Ethical Considerations
Opening up of access to information about services must be balanced against a range of privacy and safety considerations. Accessing and sharing information about residential service providers was identified as a major challenge in many of our consultations:
Some placement agencies and licensing staff said that they did not believe they could share information about service providers because of uncertainty about the legality of sharing information and concern about law suits. We were troubled to hear of several examples of placement staff who said that there were some resources that they would not use because of concerns about quality of care, but they were not able to share these concerns with other placement agencies.
Some service providers raised concerns about the framework and conditions for sharing and protecting what they perceived to be private information about their services.
Privacy and safety considerations, given the difficult and at times very conflictual circumstances leading to young people coming into care, are also important factors to take into consideration.
There is a limited tradition of sharing information between child welfare, youth justice and mental health sectors and no unique identifier which would support tracking residential services across these sectors. Issues with respect to accessing education information will also need to be examined.
Some of these issues were examined through the Ministry’s recently completed review of the CFSA. Given the Ministry’s role in funding residential services and its licensing function, it will be important to ensure that the Ministry is able to access information needed by the proposed Quality Inspectorate to meet its function. A framework will also need to be developed to determine what types of information can be shared at what level of aggregation and with whom.