Child and youth welfare facilities 2.3.7 Insufficient staffing The staffing of a facility has a direct influence on the quality of care. With sufficient resources, the care team can cope with even difficult group constellations. In contrast, the staff can become overstrained if the staffing only allows one person per shift. Insufficient staffing is a threat to the quality of care When children have an impulsive outburst, one caregiver has to try to deescalate the situation, while a second caregiver has to take care of protecting the group. If one person works alone on a shift, they can only bring themselves and the group into safety. The child who is having the impulsive outburst and also urgently needs help in this situation is left on their own. The documentation is routinely viewed on monitoring visits by the commissions. It shows that the caregivers see no other alternative than to lock themselves in with the other children to escape attack. Scenarios such as these can only be seen as most critical not only from a pedagogical but also from a human rights point of view. They also leave the social pedagogues with a sense of helplessness. Frequent occurrences of such incidents result in a high staff turnover. The staff turnover is a problem that is difficult to get under control in many shared accommodations. In one shared accommodation in Vienna, the entire team except for one employee left within a year; there was also a change in management. As is so often the case, the high staff turnover was directly connected to excessive violent incidents, which affected not only the other children but the staff too. The inhibition on the part of the cared for minors to use physical violence against the care team seemed to diminish continually. Punches in the face or the stomach were documented. From a sense of helplessness, the staff increasingly reacted to the violence by holding the minors down, as they themselves had the feeling that they had no pedagogical way of de-escalating the situation. The operator of the facility reacted with a wide range of teambuilding measures and de-escalation training programmes. Furthermore, a project was initiated to better understand the reasons for the staff turnover. High staff turnover High staff turnover can also be triggered by training that does not meet the requirements of the group and the consequent overload of the staff. The frequent breakup of relationships caused by the high turnover in turn has a negative impact on the development of the cared for minors and exacerbates the problem. The new pedagogues need time to be able to build up a relationship with the minors. Only when a relationship exists is it possible to intervene in a de-escalating manner and to act confidently. A facility can thus easily get caught in a vicious circle that is difficult to break. Some employees try to escape the strain and burnout by reducing their working hours. In a residential group in Upper Austria, all of the employees were working part-time at the time of the monitoring visit by Commission 2. This made it difficult to build up a bond with the children and adolescents. The 80