Emergency Foster Care in South Australia: What It Involves and Who Does It

The call comes after 10pm on a Friday. A child has been removed from a situation the Department for Child Protection (DCP) determined was immediately unsafe. They need somewhere to go tonight. Could you take them?

Emergency foster care in South Australia is exactly this: unscheduled, urgent, and critical. It is the most demanding form of foster care and also the form where the shortage of carers is most acute. Understanding what it actually involves — not the brochure version, but the practical reality — helps you decide whether it belongs in your life before you commit.

What is emergency foster care?

Emergency care is a placement that begins when a child must be removed from their home environment without advance notice. These removals typically occur after hours, on weekends, and during public holidays — when DCP crisis teams are responding to notifications outside normal working hours. The child may have been removed moments before the call to you is made.

These placements are short: typically one night to two weeks. Their purpose is to provide immediate safety while the DCP conducts an assessment to determine what happens next — whether the child can return home, requires a longer-term foster placement, or can be placed with family members through a kinship arrangement.

What does an emergency placement look like?

When the call comes, you may receive very limited information about the child. Child confidentiality requirements under the Children and Young People (Safety) Act 2017 mean that your agency can share only what you need to provide immediate care safely. You might know the child's approximate age, any immediate health or safety considerations, and roughly what situation they have come from. You may not know their name, their full history, or how long they will stay.

The child who arrives at your door is likely frightened, possibly in shock, and almost certainly confused about why they are there. They may be shut down and silent, or they may express their distress through behaviour that is challenging to manage in the first hours. Both are normal trauma responses in abnormal circumstances.

Your role in the first 24–48 hours is not to establish rapport or begin the process of building a relationship. It is simply to provide safety, warmth, food, and a calm environment. Experienced emergency carers describe the first night as primarily about keeping things quiet and predictable — not attempting to have meaningful conversations, not asking many questions, and not introducing a new routine until the child has had a chance to simply breathe.

What you need to be an emergency carer

Emergency carers go through exactly the same authorisation process as any other SA foster carer. There is no separate emergency-only pathway. This means:

• DHS Child-Related Employment Screening (Working with Children Check) for all adults in the household — free for carers, processed by the DHS Screening Unit, often takes eight weeks or more
• A spare bedroom available to the child at any time
• Completion of mandatory preparation training (Shared Stories Shared Lives or equivalent)
• A comprehensive home study assessment of approximately six sessions
• DCP authorisation through the Authorisation Panel process

The full process typically takes six to nine months. If you are interested in emergency care specifically, you should note this when you contact an agency — they will include emergency-specific scenarios in your preparation training and assess your authorisation to include emergency placements.

What emergency care means for your household

Emergency placements by definition cannot be scheduled. You will maintain your normal life during periods when you are on the emergency roster, but when a placement call comes, you need to be able to respond — typically within one to two hours. This has practical implications:

• You need a household that can absorb an additional child at short notice, at any time of day or night.
• If you have biological children at home, they need to be prepared for unexpected changes to household routine.
• You need to be able to take time off work, or have a partner or co-carer who can manage the initial placement period if you are unavailable.
• You need to be comfortable with uncertainty — about the child's history, the length of the placement, and what happens next.

Not every household is suited to emergency care, and this is not a failure. Many carers who eventually become emergency carers begin with planned short-term or respite placements and work toward emergency care as they build experience and confidence.

Who handles emergency placements in SA?

Emergency placements are coordinated by the DCP's after-hours crisis team, which contacts agencies to identify available carers. Different agencies manage emergency placement rosters differently. AnglicareSA, Lutheran Care, and Life Without Barriers all have established emergency placement programmes in metropolitan Adelaide. In regional South Australia, ac.care and Uniting Country SA coordinate emergency responses for their respective coverage areas, though the practical availability of carers in remote areas remains a significant challenge.

If you are interested in emergency care specifically, ask your agency directly during your initial inquiry how their emergency roster is managed, how often you might realistically receive a call, and what their after-hours support looks like for carers managing an emergency placement.

Payment for emergency placements

Emergency carers receive the same fortnightly base rate as any authorised foster carer, calculated by the child's age:

• Ages 0–4: $511.80 per fortnight
• Ages 5–12: $556.00 per fortnight
• Ages 13–17: $752.80–$872.20 per fortnight

In practice, because emergency placements are short, the payment is prorated for the duration. A placement start-up payment (ranging from $120 to $236 depending on the child's age) is also available to cover the immediate costs of bedding, clothing, and basic supplies for a child who may have arrived with nothing.

All foster care payments in SA are non-assessable income under ATO Taxation Determination TD2006/62 — they are not taxable and do not affect your Centrelink eligibility.

Why emergency carers matter

South Australia, like every other Australian state, has a shortage of foster carers. The shortage is most acute in the emergency placement category because the unpredictability and intensity of the role means fewer people self-select into it. Children who cannot be placed in emergency care face the alternative of spending their first night in a residential care facility or, in some circumstances, in DCP offices — outcomes that compound the harm they have already experienced.

Emergency carers are not asked to solve everything. They are asked to provide one thing: a safe, calm household for a child who has had the most frightening night of their life. That single provision — reliable safety when it is most needed — is the entire function of emergency care.

If you are seriously considering any form of foster care in South Australia, the South Australia Foster Care Guide maps the full authorisation process from first enquiry through to first placement, including specific preparation for emergency and short-term placements.

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