Connecting Substance-Using Pregnant People to Supports Through Healthcare Systems

Impact Highlight: With GPL support, Washington piloted a toolkit to train and support social workers in making community referrals to help reduce the number of infants removed from their parents.

Project Context:

• Pregnant caregivers with substance-use disorder (SUD) often have their children removed shortly after birth.
• Washington’s Department for Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) runs a Prenatal Substance Use-Disorder Program that aims to reduce the number of infant removals by connecting these caregivers to community-based providers.
  • The program had been established with GPL support from 2020 to 2024.
• However, community providers were only able to reach roughly one in five individuals with this program, leading to a large gap in individuals successfully enrolling in voluntary prevention services.
• DCYF wanted to test additional strategies for reaching and engaging this population through potentially more trusted individuals with whom families were already interacting.

How the GPL Supported:

• Analyzed hotline call data and spoke with providers in the Community of Practice to identify that the most common reporters calling hotlines about pregnant people with SUD were social workers in hospital settings.
• Interviewed hospital social workers to inform recommendations for warm hand-offs of pregnant people with SUD to community resources outside the child protection system.
• Created a Social Worker Referral Toolkit to train and support social workers in making those community referrals. The toolkit included:
  • A step-by-step guide and a referral flowchart to help social workers refer their pregnant patients with SUD to a local community organization.
  • Suggested language, including questions to ask and facts to emphasize, such as: “services are free and voluntary.”
  • A patient-centered handout, a list of frequently asked questions, and contact information for local resources.

Results:

• Social workers in King County tested the toolkit on a small scale and referred eligible individuals to one of the community providers, Help Me Grow.
  • This pathway demonstrated promising signs of higher engagement rates compared to other referral pathways that did not involve social workers as direct referrers.
• Based on the success of this testing, Help Me Grow and DCYF agreed to plan how to expand this pathway to other social workers in the county, then eventually statewide.