The Isle of Man's services for children with disabilities are under increasing pressure as numbers have risen sharply, Manx Care has said.
It comes after an Ofsted report found child services on the island required "significant improvement".
Inspectors stated that a very inconsistent service was having a detrimental impact on too many disabled children. Julie Gibney (pic.), of Children and Family Services, said numbers had doubled over the past 12 to 18 months.
She added: "We're not meeting the current need and we certainly won't meet the future need given the numbers that are now being assessed and identified." The existing service needed to be expanded to meet the growing pressure, she continued, suggesting that Public Health undertake research "to see why these numbers are increasing at such a rate".
A key reason for pressures on the service was difficulty recruiting enough social workers, Ms Gibney said. She went on: "If you've got a constant turnover of staff you will never get improvements and developments to where you need them to be."
However, she said recruitment had "significantly improved" over the last two years. There was now a permanent senior management team in place while a number of interim workers had stayed on as full-time members of staff, she said.
Ms Gibney said she was confident that the "capacity across the teams had improved" and they were in "the right place to push improvements forward".
