Focusing on Coordinated Services

July 15, 2022
| Kathleen Dwyer and OPRE’s Coordinated Services Team
coordinated graphic

Many social service providers recognize that children and families may face complex, interdependent challenges and that services to address their needs may come from a range of providers. In response, providers may intentionally coordinate services under one or more organizations, with the goal of increasing access to services and improving the lives of children and families.

 

To improve the field’s understanding of how providers coordinate multiple services to support children and families, OPRE has developed a portfolio of research and evaluation projects on this topic. The projects span OPRE’s program-specific research portfolios, including Head Start, child care, home visiting, child welfare, and welfare and family self-sufficiency. Across these projects, OPRE aims to extract lessons and key findings to gain a comprehensive understanding of the state of the evidence related to service coordination and to identify knowledge gaps and next steps for research and evaluation.

 

How OPRE Is Coordinating Among Coordinated Services Projects

 

We are taking several steps to move toward a coordinated services research agenda. Internally, we share information across projects so that our related research and evaluation efforts intentionally build on one another. We have also supported cross-project convenings and the development of a toolkit of resources to promote coordination across projects.

 

We are also centralizing research about coordinated services projects on the OPRE website. With this blog post, we are excited to share a new OPRE resource page with information on relevant projects and publications. On the resource page, a table describes the OPRE projects that focus on coordinated services. The table includes links to project webpages, information about the focal population (for example, families with low incomes or families enrolled in Head Start), the relevant ACF programs (not just the program through which the project was funded), the level of service coordination that is addressed (that is, whether it is at the local level or the state or tribal level), and the years of the project. Readers can navigate to project webpages to learn more about the projects and access related publications. An example of a table entry is provided below:

Coordinated services table example

 

 

 

Learning from Complementary Activities Across Projects

 

Across these projects, we are carrying out complementary activities aimed at building the evidence related to service coordination. These include:

  • Foundational activities like literature reviews, national scans of approaches to service coordination, and conceptual model development.
  • In-depth qualitative research and process studies to better understand how programs coordinate services to support children and families and how children and families engage with multiple programs.
  • A national descriptive study.
  • Work to develop measures of constructs that are specific to service coordination.
  • Supporting formative evaluations and evaluation capacity building efforts to strengthen coordinated services models and the field’s capacity to evaluate them.

 

We are sharing learnings from these activities across the projects, so that the projects are building on another and not starting over each time.

 

Developing a Shared Picture of Service Coordination

 

Drawing on these complementary research activities across program areas, we’ve developed a common picture of service coordination. Service coordination can be initiated at federal, state, tribal, and local levels. Federal, state, or tribal level coordination can involve (1) system-level work such as setting policy or organizational roles; (2) connecting agencies and promoting partnership among them; and/or (3) providing resources and assistance to encourage and sustain local alignment across service providers. Locally, including within organizations/agencies or partnered groups of organizations/agencies, coordinated services may take a holistic approach that considers the range of a child or family’s needs. This holistic approach may include support for families to set and progress towards goals that the family sets. Regardless of the level at which services are initiated or funded, a common expectation is that coordination will be felt by the families receiving the services — for example, access to multiple services will be easier, or outcomes will be improved because services are aligned.

 

Across the different projects, we’ve also identified examples of coordination strategies that may be carried out by federal, state, tribal, and local partners and service providers. All of these strategies involve effort, although they vary in intensity. Examples of coordination strategies include:

  • adopting a shared mission and goals;
  • aligning program rules, such as enrollment criteria and service calendars, to enable better coordination;
  • aligning, sharing, and/or jointly pursuing resources, such as funding, staffing, and data systems;
  • streamlining processes, such as intake, enrollment, assessment, and referrals;
  • following up with families or partners to support service completion as families progress;
  • collecting data, measuring common outcomes, and participating in a shared continuous quality improvement process; and
  • emphasizing relationships and communication between organizations and agencies, or between multiple service providers and families, aiming to strengthen and broaden services for a family and reduce barriers to service access and participation.

 

Next Steps in the Coordinated Services Research and Evaluation Portfolio

 

To date, the group of projects has coordinated efforts so the projects build on one another, and we’ve developed a picture of service coordination and examples of coordination at the state, tribal, and local levels. Our next steps toward developing a research agenda focused on service coordination include taking a cross-cutting look at the findings from the multiple projects, including findings from literature reviews, environmental scans, conceptual model development, and qualitative and quantitative research, and identifying research gaps and next steps for research evaluation.

 

Kathleen Dwyer, Ph.D., is a Senior Social Science Research Analyst working on projects in the areas of child care, Head Start and Early Head Start, family assistance, and child welfare.

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