Administrative Supports for Comprehensive Family
Assessment
It is clear that comprehensive family assessment is not
practiced consistently in the field. Jurisdictions vary in their
capacity and commitment to comprehensive family assessment, but the
bottom line is that the Child and Family Services Reviews indicate
a general need for improvement in this area to enhance the
responsiveness of interventions to the needs of the family.
The key areas where administrative supports are needed for
comprehensive family assessment to move forward are:
Direction and support in policies
Availability, adequacy, and accessibility of services
Training and preparing staff
Clinical supervision and mentoring
Coordination of services provided through other agencies
Systems of accountability and evaluation—including forms
for documenting information, time lines, and responsibilities, as
well as quality assurance procedures to determine if assessment
practices are being implemented and whether they are affecting
outcomes.
Direction and Support in Policies
Policies refer to a wide range of written directions or
standards that inform practice. They include statutes, state plans
submitted to the federal government as well as to state
legislatures, policy manuals for the public child welfare system
and its staff, practice standards, and procedures for case
practice.
The level of articulation of practice necessarily varies
depending on the particular document in question; child welfare
policy manuals, for instance, are more specific and concrete than
state statutes. What is necessary, however, is to assure congruence
among different policies as well as to support the more specific
with the more general framework.
Common policy areas that should be examined in light of
providing support for comprehensive family assessment include:
Distinguishing between assessments—safety, risk, and
comprehensive family assessment, requiring all of them as needed,
and clarifying their initial and ongoing mutual relationships to
case practice;
Incorporating the workload implications of completing
comprehensive family assessments into staffing needs and time
frames for assessments to be completed;
Clarifying expectations related to the process of comprehensive
family assessment, such as the involvement of fathers and other
relevant family members, as well as community providers who know
the child, youth, and family;
Clarifying the nature of child protective services as being
more than the “investigation of allegations,” more
comprehensive than “incident-focused”—yet still
focused on safety, permanency, and child well-being;
Fortifying practices that involve mental health, substance
abuse, domestic violence, and public health by federal, state, and
local policies that facilitate collaborations across programs;
Including language that supports family engagement and
involvement, individualized assessments, and ongoing assessment and
re-assessments; and
Providing a framework for comprehensive assessment that clearly
helps staff with the process of gathering and using assessment
information, including information on protective factors in service
plans.
Availability, Adequacy, and Accessibility of Services
For frontline staff to do comprehensive assessments in ways
envisioned in these guidelines, it is essential that the child
welfare agency ensure that the array and accessibility of services
are enhanced in the following ways:
The agency's purchase of service system needs to assure
that they are able to buy what families need.
Services need to be available where families live or
transportation supports need to be built into purchase of service
contracts to assure families can access needed services.
Services must be adequate to the demand. Services may be
available, but if they entail lengthy waiting lists, they are
responsive neither to the needs of families nor the time frames
required under ASFA guidelines.
Services must be provided in a culturally sensitive manner and
available in a language the family can understand.
Assessment information on individual cases can be aggregated
for planning purposes to identify gaps in services
availability.
Aggregating assessment information with regard to needed
services by geographic areas of the State may help the State to
identify gaps in its service array and to plan for needed resource
development.
Caseworkers are often not prepared by age, education, and
experience to delve into the circumstances of individual families,
to engage families in a change process, to get a full picture of
the underlying issues and resources, to reach appropriate
conclusions about the meaning of the information gathered, and to
use this information in service planning and ongoing
decision-making.
This understandably challenging reality needs to be recognized
and addressed in the formal training curricula for child welfare
staff as well as in the less-formal patterns of clinical
supervision and mentoring.
Areas that warrant examination in the existing process of
training and preparation of staff include:
Incorporating materials on the nature and distinguishing
features of safety, risk, and comprehensive assessments and how
they are used;
Understanding the types of abuse and neglect and associated
family dynamics;
Understanding and incorporating family-centered values and
beliefs into case practice.
Training on engagement, building a helping relationship, and
interviewing family members including children and non-custodial
parents;
Training on the benefits and process for family team
meetings;
Training on the process of conducting and using comprehensive
family assessment—staff need to be trained in how to do
accurate and complete assessments and how to use the information
appropriately;
Defining and structuring caseworker roles in light of the more
comprehensive work of going beyond presenting problems and
examination of allegations;
Specifying when re-assessments are needed, how to gather
information on case progress, when to revise service plans;
Making judgments using comprehensive assessment information;
understanding and utilizing “stages of change” to guide
decisions;
Learning how to help families use protective factors to
leverage necessary changes;
Helping staff identify what has to change to achieve the
outcomes of safety, permanency, and child well-being; building
service plans based on comprehensive assessments, and ensuring that
the assessments do not simply generate laundry lists of unrelated
needs, but are focused on the outcomes;
Guiding staff in the use of specialized
assessments—initial screening, when to involve specialized
assessments, and how to focus and use results in service planning;
and
Helping staff to identify and use resources in the community
and to develop facilitation skills and strategies.
Clinical supervision is vital to reinforce what is covered in
formal training as well as to provide guidance to caseworkers in
gathering assessment information, using it to develop service
plans, as well as interpreting ongoing assessment information at
key decision points.
Clinical supervision assumes the supervisor focuses on guiding
staff in making judgments and decisions on cases.
The patterns of supervision, the actual roles supervisors play,
and the focus on guiding and supporting caseworker decisions vary
within and across jurisdictions.
There are particular areas of practice that are known to be
problematic for frontline staff. It would be useful to examine how
each of these is or could be supported through supervision:
Incorporating information from intake, safety, and risk
assessments into comprehensive family assessments;
Engaging families, children, and youth;
Working with other agencies;
Obtaining parental permission and authorizing releases of
information;
Making decisions about specialized assessments;
Conducting re-assessments at particular points in the case
process;
Making judgments based on comprehensive family assessment as to
what has to change to achieve outcomes;
Using assessment information, including protective factors, in
service planning; and
Evaluating family progress.
It is often helpful to have clinically strong caseworkers
operate as case consultants to less-experienced staff to augment
clinical supervision.
Caseworkers need transfer of learning opportunities through
observation, mentoring, evaluation, and feedback regarding the
incorporation of training content into practice, and other ways to
cement the understanding and incorporation of principles and
practices associated with comprehensive family assessment.
Coordination of Services Provided Through Other Agencies
Comprehensive family assessment assumes that information will
both be gathered from and shared with other agencies that have been
involved with the family or that will be part of the services
outlined in the service plan. When working with other agencies,
caseworkers will need support from their supervisor and agency to
assure that issues related to parental consent and confidentiality
are sufficiently addressed.
This cross-program focus is difficult to achieve when
collaboration is not the norm. As indicated above, policies have to
be in place to support cross-agency collaborations; this cannot
happen solely through efforts of front-line staff and
supervisors.
Jurisdictions vary in the degree that child welfare staff
operate as case managers more than direct service providers, but in
every case, the child welfare agency has the ultimate
responsibility to decide who will be served, what the overall focus
of intervention needs to be, and whether the child, youth, and
family are getting the services they need and are making the
changes necessary to achieve the outcomes of safety, permanency,
and child well-being.
In fact, most child welfare agencies recognize the need to
collaborate with other agencies in the community. The needs of
children and families require their involvement. Therefore, the
issues of cross-agency collaboration are vital to address.
In relation to comprehensive family assessment, some mutual
administrative support mechanisms that may enhance collaboration
should be explored. These include:
Policies and processes of information sharing, including
obtaining releases of information;
Confidentiality protection arrangements;
Purchase of service contract provisions/memoranda of
understanding that support sharing and utilizing information vital
to understanding needs and evaluating progress of families'
toward goals;
Reporting obligations from agencies related to changes in
clients or progress on outcomes when services are provided to child
welfare clients—reporting has to meet the informational needs
of child welfare;
Participation in family meetings, case conferences, and other
forums where needs assessment information is being developed for
service planning decision-making;
Preparation of child welfare staff in obtaining and using
information from other agencies—the purposes of every
referral for specialized evaluations and/or services should be
clear to everyone involved;
Identification of the process of assuring that other agencies
involved with families have and utilize comprehensive family
assessment information in service/treatment plans across agencies;
and
Cross-training opportunities as well as opportunities for
jobshadowing and other mechanisms that promote better understanding
across systems.
In each jurisdiction, the child welfare administration has to
guarantee that the following is done for all open cases:
The comprehensive family assessment takes place;
The process in the guidelines is followed;
The results are utilized in service plans;
Services address needs;
Evaluations of case progress are directly tied to the specific
changes needed in each case to contribute to the outcomes; and
The entire process of assessment, service planning, service
delivery, reviews of progress, key case decisions, and outcomes is
documented in the paper or electronic case folder.
In addition, the jurisdiction's quality assurance programs
need to monitor key issues such as family engagement and
involvement, individualization of assessment and service planning,
and the comprehensive focus on needs that stand in the way of
longer-term achievement and the sustaining of safety, permanency,
and well-being of children.
Some necessary administrative supports related to accountability
and evaluation are:
The documentation of the process of comprehensive family
assessment—frameworks and forms completion;
The development of procedures for regular case record reviews
to examine whether and how comprehensive family assessment
information is gathered and utilized for service planning;
The development of resource allocation decisions in relation to
time needed for assessment;
The determination of how information is shared and utilized by
other agencies and coordinated by child welfare;
The process for sampling case records to determine the
relationship between needs identified and services utilized and the
responsiveness to established time lines; and
The capacity to measure outcomes in relation to the quality and
comprehensiveness of the needs assessment and whether the
interventions had an impact on the needs identified in the
assessment.
A process must be in place for continual quality improvement
that involves using accountability and evaluation information for
course corrections in policies, training, clinical supervision, and
collaborations across systems as well as case practice.
There needs to be a continuous feedback loop to assure practice
fidelity and to support supervisory capacity to help staff
implement the content, process, utilization, and documentation of
comprehensive family assessment.
Incorporation of peer reviews, coaching, and mentoring have all
been found useful in the process of continual quality improvement.
Focusing staff on the distinctive purposes and methods of utilizing
comprehensive assessments is essential.