LAST-MINUTE cancellations of after school care is wreaking havoc with the lives of parents who are "scrambling" to piece together their working lives and caring for their children.
St Nicholas OOSH, an out of school hours care service run by the Maitland-Newcastle Catholic Diocese, has come under fire for cancelling care multiple days a week, and sometimes giving parents very little notice - the night before or the day of.
Genevieve Trudgett, a single mum from Kilaben Bay in Lake Macquarie, told the Newcastle Herald she was forced to phone her father who lives in Maitland to collect her son from school one day because she was at work, hours from home, and suddenly had four hours to cover for her son because they were not running OOSH.
"Then on the Sunday night they cancelled the Monday afternoon, so he rang the school and spoke to the principal again," Ms Trudgett said.
There have been other times where she has been forced to call her next-door neighbour, she said, and ask him to leave work to go and pick up her son.
"I don't have the option to stop work or reduce my hours ... I'm a disability worker. I have really high needs clients.
"They see you as someone that helps them and they rely on - it's hard for them to understand that I need to go do this, like pick my son up."
Another parent said she received an email at 6.50pm on a Monday to say the service was shut down for the rest of the week.
"This is my livelihood, this is killing me," she said.
"I am a support coordinator works with people with disability and aged care in the health sector. We have spent two years scrambling to help for people in their homes set up and adjust.
"Our big issue is - don't tell me you didn't know until at ten to seven on a Monday night. Don't tell us at 4.50pm on a Friday afternoon that there is no care for the next week."
Another affected mum works in the emergency department of Maitland hospital, which was already scrambling to find staff, she said.
David Healy, executive director of St Nicholas in the Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle, said the service was "not immune to the staffing shortages that are currently sweeping across the early childhood education and care sector."
"The reasons for this nation-wide shortage are many and varied and include an exodus of staff leaving the sector after a challenging two years on the front line during the pandemic," Mr Healy said.
"Additionally, more temporary shortages are also being experienced across the sector due to high transmission rates of seasonal illnesses, the emergence of COVID-19 variants and, government-enforced isolation requirements for people who contract COVID-19 or are awaiting PCR test results."
St Nicholas OOSH acknowledged the shortages had inconvenienced families and he appreciated how accommodating parents had been, particularly when hours changed at short notice due to unplanned staff absences owing to illness.
