NEWS INDEX Archives 2004 November

Child-welfare web site gives caseworkers first-time access to data

Craig Chamberlain, News Editor
217-333-2894; cdchambe@uiuc.edu

11/17/04

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Child-welfare caseworkers tend to focus on daily crises.

State and federal governments, when looking at child welfare, are focused increasingly on outcomes – on long-term progress in the overall safety, permanency and well-being of the foster-care population.

Illinois caseworkers and agencies can now integrate the two, bringing outcome-based concerns into their day-to-day practice, thanks to a federally funded project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Central to the project is a Web site, brought online in mid-September, which, for the first time in any state, makes agency-specific outcome data available to those in the field.

“The key to this data is that it’s really based on performance over time, and that’s also what makes it very unique,” according to Melinda Lis, the project director and assistant director of the Children and Family Research Center (CFRC), part of the university’s School of Social Work. “An agency can really get an idea of how they are faring over a number of years.”

Caseworkers and administrators get the outcome data specific to their own agency through a password-protected section of the Web site, which includes data going back to 1996. Another part of the site, accessible without a password, breaks down the state’s outcome data by region and by public and private sector.

“Many agencies have been surprised to learn precisely where they stood on various indicators,” said Mary Ann Hartnett, the project’s principal investigator and associate director of the CFRC. “The data helps them to focus on the outcomes that need improvement,” she said.

The funding to develop the “Outcome Based Child Welfare Practice” Web site, which could serve as a model for other states, came from a three-year grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “HHS was very interested in how to take outcomes and make them more integral to the real work, the daily work, that caseworkers and agencies do,” Lis said.

The site also provides outcome-based training modules, free of charge, which can be easily adapted to individual agency needs, Hartnett said. This is especially important in Illinois, where about 80 percent of children in foster care are served by private agencies, many of which don’t have the time or resources to develop training of their own, she said.

“I think what our curriculum does that makes it very unique is it builds a bridge from the federally mandated outcomes and actually walks it down to the casework level,” Hartnett said. It ties together an outcome-based focus with the recognized best practices in the field, showing how to help achieve big-picture goals on a case-by-case basis, she said.

Outcomes have been an important aspect of child welfare, and caseworkers and agencies have always strived to achieve certain outcomes in their cases, Hartnett and Lis noted. But those outcomes were not standardized and fully defined until HHS began its Child and Family Services Review, a process over the last four years of reviewing states’ compliance with federal child-welfare requirements. Those requirements were an outgrowth of the federal Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997.

Illinois was an ideal place to develop an outcomes-based Web site, Hartnett said, because the state’s Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) had a history of quality data-gathering going back at least two decades.

Added to that was the partnership between DCFS and the Children and Family Research Center, going back to a 1996 agreement, which makes projects like this one possible.

The CFRC also had a history of applying technology to child-welfare training and practice. Two years ago, the center, working with the university’s Prairienet Community Network, produced an online reference manual for use by all caseworkers in Illinois.

The center also has been noted for its research on subsidized guardianship and adoption of foster children, particularly as it relates to those in the care of relatives. It is the recipient of a two-year, $5.8 million grant from The Pew Charitable Trusts to host a national education and outreach program, called Fostering Results, that is raising awareness of issues facing children in foster care.