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Paper

Child welfare transformation at Brant: examining child performance outcomes

abstract

Background and introduction
The Children's Aid Society of Brant (Brant CAS) is a medium sized child welfare organization, which serves a population of approximately 130,000. It is situated in Ontario, Canada. In the county of Brant there are two large centres, Brantford and Paris, a number of small communities and two First Nation communities: Six Nations of the Grand and New Credit of the Mississaugas. The agency provides a full continuum of child protection services to families with culturally diverse backgrounds including a significant Aboriginal population. The organization has a Branch office on the Six Nations reserve and a team specifically serving the urban Aboriginal population. Other diverse communities in the area include a wide-ranging immigrant population representing some 100 different first languages primarily from European, Asian, Middle Eastern countries.
In Ontario, child protection agencies are designated by counties, are governed by independent Board of Directors mandated by provincial legislation and funded by the Province. Although funded by the Ontario Provincial government; Children's Aid Societies are deemed a 'Non Government Organization'.
The government conducted an evaluation of child welfare and as a result in 2004 initiated Child Welfare Transformation. Transformation is a complex change initiative that includes several implementation requirements and impacts on all areas of a child welfare agency. Child Welfare Transformation involves significant policy revisions, changes in expectations and a shift in practice to ensure child welfare is a strength based, child focused, collaborative model of services imbedded in a proactive community response to minimize risk to children.
There are seven key elements in Transformation including (i) a Differential Response service to reports of child maltreatment that employs new assessment tools for risk and safety as well as achieves a better balance of assessing family strengths, increasing family engagement, decreasing reliance on formal court processes and employs strength based family centred approaches to service delivery (ii) increasing options to achieve permanency for children and (iii) accountability mechanisms that move away from a traditional compliance focus to a focus on outcomes.

Purpose
In response to Transformation, Brant CAS has undertaken an annual Quality Assurance Child and Performance Outcomes Report. The agency also made a commitment that measuring and reporting outcomes would be a collaborative effort and that the process would inform improvements in services to clients. To that end, there were several points when the management team and members of the Board of Directors were directly involved in identifying priorities from the framework of the Performance Outcomes Report for collection and baseline analysis.
The Child and Performance Outcomes Report begins with a set of six core goals; (i) child safety, (ii) child permanency and stability in placements, (iii) child well being, (iv) service compliance to Standards and Regulations, (v) community involvement and integration, and (vi) collaborative approach. From these Goals, twelve Outcomes Statements were developed with forty-seven Indicators set to measure the outcomes.
The Board of Directors selected 19 of the 47 indicators to be measured the first year. Members of the management team took responsibility for some data collection and reporting and the Quality Assurance manager has overseen the work.

Lessons learned
The first year of implementing a Performance Outcomes Report focused on (i) building buy-in and collaboration and (ii) identifying primary source data and (iii) building the capacity to extract raw information from the existing database. In order to collect information from disparate areas of service, the agency has been committed to a process that aimed at garnering buy-in and collaboration within organizational departments. In the first year there have been numerous challenges mining data from the system. This stems from the fact that the data system was originally designed to report on rudimentary case data which met Ministry financial reporting requirements but was not designed to provide outcome data or case descriptors.
Gathering baseline data as well as some analysis has been done the first year. However most importantly the organization has learned much about the requirements for reporting outcomes and the process of building internal collaboration. Key to the success has been dedicated leadership to guide the process. The collaborative approach has demanded more effort and attention at the onset but is now proving to have long-term positive impact on not only measuring and reporting outcomes but also on supporting continual quality improvement. The Performance Outcomes Report also has secondary benefits by contributing to organization awareness of implementation of various Child Welfare Transformation initiatives across the organization.

Recommendations
Successful implementation of a Performance Outcomes report must be untaken as a process with leadership, dedicated staff, and collaboration across the organization.

Key references

  • Ministry of Community and Social Services (2001) Social Indicators for Ontario's Child Welfare Program. Forecasting and Analysis Unit.
  • Goodman, D., Leblanc, T. and Lumsden, A. (2006) 'Quality Assurance Framework: The House of Bricks' OACAS Journal 48, 1, 17-22 .

 
Contact details

Rhonda Hallberg, email: rhonda_hallberg@rogers.com

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