Improving the Match Between Connecticut Families and Child Welfare Services

The Government Performance Lab awarded pro bono technical assistance to help Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families pilot improvements to the way the agency matches families to services.

The Challenge: Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) identified three areas where the agency sought to strengthen its practice:

1) When matching families with services, social workers often lacked important information on the history and risk factors of the family, what services were available, and the providers who administer those services. Data collected at the social worker, regional, and central agency levels were not connected, so it was challenging for case workers to know whether the family had been treated before and whether or not the treatment had been effective.

Heavy caseloads and high turnover among social workers made it difficult to build informal institutional knowledge, so social workers often were only familiar with a handful of the more than 90 services available, matching clients with available slots in the services they were familiar with. Clinical staff were available to social workers to advise on cases with factors such as trauma or substance use, but many workers did not consult the clinical staff, causing information on client needs to pass undetected.

2) The agency was eager to shift its service array to better match the needs of the population it serves, but because it did not track service preferences or consistently maintain waitlists, it was not able to judge what services its population actually needed but had not been able to obtain. 3) Providers and agency staff wanted to work more closely on improving service fit, timeliness, and program delivery but needed additional supports in structuring that collaboration.

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