Understanding Costs And Outcomes In Child Welfare Services

Today's child welfare services operate under a limited supply of resources. This book explains how finite resources can be used most effectively, providing social work managers and policymakers with a comprehensive costing model to assess the links between needs, costs and outcomes across the full range of child welfare services.

This text presents the findings of a set of original research studies and reports on the way that care services for children are delivered, the cost of providing services and the extent to which they improve outcomes for children. It also looks at services provided by the statutory, and examines how resources are distributed.

Every day, social service agencies collect millions of pieces of data about the children and families they serve. Agencies depend on this data to inform decision-making by personnel throughout the organization and to provide meaningful research and evaluation on program effectiveness and outcomes. As capacity for collecting and utilizing data has increased so has the recognition that this data can and should be used more broadly. Further, it should include not just single-system data, but data across different human service agencies. Administrative/big data systems can be powerful tools in increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of public child welfare services. Understanding, harnessing, and using big data holds tremendous promise in creating transformative change in the social services. Data analytics and data mining can lead to a better understanding of what services work for specific populations (targeting and predictive modelling), provide a more nuanced understanding of service outcomes for the workforce and major stakeholders (transparency), and facilitate collaboration across existing service delivery silos to reduce duplication of services and enhance consumer access to services (efficiency). This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Public Child Welfare.

It costs more to place a child in the care of a local authority than it does to send a child to a top boarding school, and there are substantial variations in costs both between and within authorities. This book gets to the bottom of the costs of care and provides an insight into how these variations in cost relate to differences in children's needs, and most importantly, whether higher costs reflect better services and better outcomes for children. Costs and Consequences for Children Placed Away from Home draws from new original research, and considers the implications for best practice and future policy. It also features information about a newly pioneered resource: a fully workable decision analysis model designed for use in local authorities which uses historical data for each child to calculate the probable cost consequences of difference placement choices. This book sheds light on how to calculate the financial and social costs of care, and will be invaluable to both social work managers and policy makers working in children's services.

Each year, child protective services receive reports of child abuse and neglect involving six million children, and many more go unreported. The long-term human and fiscal consequences of child abuse and neglect are not relegated to the victims themselves -- they also impact their families, future relationships, and society. In 1993, the National Research Council (NRC) issued the report, Under-standing Child Abuse and Neglect, which provided an overview of the research on child abuse and neglect. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research updates the 1993 report and provides new recommendations to respond to this public health challenge. According to this report, while there has been great progress in child abuse and neglect research, a coordinated, national research infrastructure with high-level federal support needs to be established and implemented immediately. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research recommends an actionable framework to guide and support future child abuse and neglect research. This report calls for a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to child abuse and neglect research that examines factors related to both children and adults across physical, mental, and behavioral health domains--including those in child welfare, economic support, criminal justice, education, and health care systems--and assesses the needs of a variety of subpopulations. It should also clarify the causal pathways related to child abuse and neglect and, more importantly, assess efforts to interrupt these pathways. New Directions in Child Abuse and Neglect Research identifies four areas to look to in developing a coordinated research enterprise: a national strategic plan, a national surveillance system, a new generation of researchers, and changes in the federal and state programmatic and policy response.