Strengthening In-Home Child Welfare Services for Families in Arizona

The Government Performance Lab (GPL) provided technical assistance to help Arizona’s Department of Child Safety better support children at risk of abuse or neglect by improving the quality of in-home family services.

The Challenge: Arizona’s Department of Child Safety (DCS) faced a troubling trend—families who had been in the department’s care often experienced subsequent incidents of child maltreatment despite having received services designed to prevent future incidents of abuse and neglect. From 2016-2018, DCS had successfully reduced the number of children living in out-ofhome settings by 25%, and increased the use of family support services— including parenting skills training, referrals to other resources, and case coordination— designed to improve family stability and outcomes. Despite Arizona’s comparatively low rates of recurring maltreatment overall, the department discovered that family support services did not appear to be sufficiently preventing repeated incidents of maltreatment. For example, among families who received supportive in-home preservation services, nearly 1 in 5 were re-reported for future maltreatment, with the majority of these re-reports resulting in the removal of at least one child from the home.

In order to improve outcomes for families receiving in-home services, DCS set out to improve the quality of its contracted in-home preservation services. To identify the underlying causes of poor service delivery and generate and test solutions, DCS established collaborative practices between service providers and agency staff, connected previously siloed data to drive insights into client outcomes, and established mechanisms for sustaining improvements to services.

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