Addressing Barriers Quicker

We’ve seen a significant benefit in the increased family team meetings and the addition of “nontraditional” participants. In fact, we’ve seen that these additional people feel empowered when they find out that their participation can positively impact the children’s future and the parents’ success.

It’s exciting for all of us, though, to see each other discarding the silos of roles and getting back to the basics of focusing on results. When we partner together, we push up our sleeves, jump in and rely on each other to focus on solutions and not roles. Even better, we’ve gone even further and explored the potential of new roles for families’ personal network.

We’ve been able to address barriers more quickly, so it provides results more quickly. And who can’t appreciate that?

The natural advantage to bringing in more people is that we’re also building an informal support system for the family. Our work is intensive while the case is open, so you can imagine what an adjustment it can be when suddenly we’re out of the picture. Those additional people and the informal supports they create are key, because they will be involved with the family long after we are gone. We have to identify people in the families’ lives that can take the ball when we step aside.

Heidi

Family Team Meetings

Utilizing family team meetings has been a great way to come together to support a family. Uniting everyone is so beneficial, especially on a complicated case.

Family team meetings are a critical way to engage parents, attorneys and other stakeholders. However, through collaboration, we began holding them more often, evolving past the one-time-only engagement. When we held additional family meetings, we were able to engage “nontraditional” members in the meetings like people from the family’s church, school staff, friends and relatives.

Traditionally, cases started with a family team meeting, the assessment and case plan was written, and that was it for family meetings. As we get to know the families after the team meeting, we learn about more people who are influential in the lives of the families - people who can potentially make a significant impact in the success of the family. But we only find out about those individuals by blending the work and knowledge of everyone on the team.

We’ve also recognized that to reach our mutual goals, we have to step out of our comfort zone and break free of traditional roles. A common barrier has traditionally been client transportation, especially when it comes to resources. In the past we may have walked away from the issue because it was someone else’s responsibility. Now we look at these other people in the families’ personal network and seek out those individuals and identify how they can fill in that gap – a gap that can be so detrimental to the families’ success.


Jody

Getting the whole team involved

Working in a partnership model has been a great boost for employee morale. When we’re meeting as a team, supervisors for both public and private agencies have an opportunity to model for staff. When Heidi is in a meeting with staff from both agencies, she will provide great input and consultation. Her staff sees that and can feel comfortable speaking up and giving their input. They are inspired to take part in the conversation and the solutions. My staff sees that it is a partnership and that it takes information from everyone to make the best solution.

We are also in a position to help each other support our staff. We’re all working with the same family, and since we’re communicating, we experience the ups and downs of a case together. That enables staff to respond to issues on the case quicker, but also to support each other. The unique perspective we each bring to the case is important, which is why case management is structured the way it is.

Jody

Communication and Trust

The benefits of consistent communication have been clear. When people are involved, there is naturally opportunity for change. When things change or when issues arise, it’s critical to have everyone involved in the problem-solving process. Our best ideas are born when we have more information, so we make communication a priority.

When we’re communicating regularly, we all know who is doing what, and we have the freedom to talk about the why. When you’re building trust with a family, it’s so important to all be on the same page. It’s important for the family to know that everyone is working toward the same goal, which is the best outcome for everyone.

When we work together and everyone knows what the other is doing, we also know that when we come back together, we can predict where the family will be in their progress. This minimizes the need for problem solving and makes it easier for the family and everyone involved in the case to see where we made progress and what we need to work on.

It’s been great to see the collaboration between our staff.

Heidi

Partnership in Permanency: consistency and communication

This next series of posts gives some insight to partnership within Iowa's Family, Risk & Permanency services...

To public and private agency employees, partnership can be seen if you look into the core of a relationship. It’s how well you know the person on the other end.

The next series of blog posts will take you down the path of two supervisors involved with FSRP (Family Safety, Risk, and Permanency) services which are designed to provide support to families and connect them to resources when they’re involved in the child welfare system. The services help them manage self sufficiency and child safety. Jody is a supervisor on the public side and Heidi is a supervisor for a private agency. They have worked together on cases and seen the real benefits of partnership and collaboration.

Jody: The most obvious way we collaborate is consistent communication. Supervisors from both the public and private agencies meet on a regular basis to discuss how things are going. While that always seems like common sense in theory, the tricky part is to make it happen.

There are many sides to keeping each other up-to-date on a case that you are mutually responsible for. First of all, the start of a case is immediate and everyone has to mobilize in a quick timeframe. In the beginning, there is so much discovery involved, and it’s important to keep communication open so that we can decide the best strategies to meet the defined goals.

We literally come together to staff cases – it’s not just a matter of being assigned to the same case. Everyone has an equal voice when we talk about hurdles and what we can do about them. It’s all about being solution-focused. In the past there wasn’t a forum for clinical consultation, but working in the model of partnership, we come up with better solutions because of the inclusive working environment. We’ve gone from a crisis-driven mode to a collaborative mode, and our staff is doing their best work ever.

Looking back (the private agency perspective)

There is perhaps the misconception that partnership means we’re buddies. That’s not what it’s about - this partnership is a redefined, clearly understood shared accountability. A conversation about results is not just whether or not something is working. It is what do we do differently? And why?

Again, note the “we.” Talking about what “we” can do frees us up to acknowledge our own challenges, because we know the focus will be on how we can solve problems, rather than pointing out each other’s faults.

One of the values of being part of this team is now I understand my public agency partners and the context in which they work better. I have a clearer sense of their challenges unique to that world, and how they differ from mine. This understanding helps inform my future interactions.

Looking back (from the public agency perspective)

The work is done; the recommendation has been implemented.

Reflecting on the team’s work together, this experience has already impacted agency interactions outside of this task force.

Statewide public and private agencies will continue to have issues of challenging each other, but this opens up the door for clinical conversations which enhance and make the partnership more effective. There’s less finger pointing and talk of “You’re not doing this right…” We talk about how we can come together to figure out how we can do “that’ better.

Nationwide we’ve found there is not much insight on how to move performance contracting forward. The one thing we’ve heard over and over is that the communication and the relationship makes or breaks it.

When all parties commit to open communication, it creates an understanding that leads us to a better working relationship. Taking that relationship to a higher level exposes the reality that we really can see better results.

In the end…

While we wrestled with those questions, a natural progression in the conversation was to staff. More than ever, we needed to support front line staff and supervisors to help them realize the results we will achieve together.

How did we do this? Again – we focused on practice. Keeping front line staff and supervisors from both public and private agencies in mind, we discussed what they would need to be successful together. Success was defined as the outcome of the case, and this success can not be achieved without both agencies problem solving together.

In the end this team, whose charge was to recommend changes for a payment structure, created a recommendation that contained more language about practice improvement than payment.

Not a perfect fit

To define our route, we first asked the question, “How are we doing today?” (Notice “we”). We pulled some data and looked at some individual cases. Focusing on practice alone, we said, “Our goal is to do better. Let’s do it.”

Reality was that we were doing well. But the goal is to do better, so we identified cases that just don’t “fit” typical case progression. Then we asked the question, “How do we deal with the cases that don’t “fit?”

“When a case doesn’t “fit,” what is the practice that supports the safety of the child and the family – that can keep the agency involved?” We looked at practice and practicality – if disincentives are used to manage outcomes, at what level can agencies sustain providing services?

The first concern is the safety of the child and family, so how do we define a manageable approach to these cases? Most important – what is a manageable approach that both private and public agencies can successfully work together on?

A different kind of conversation

It’s easy to point the finger and tell others what they’re doing wrong, but not as easy to talk in front of everyone about what you’re doing wrong. One of our team members was instrumental in setting the tone for the team’s success. She talked about reviewing hundreds of cases and finding where her own staff struggled to meet expected outcomes. In front of all of us, she said the framework just wasn’t working. She said, “I need to figure out with you how to make this work.”

A few simple words that changed the conversation.

We decided to define the end at the beginning; start with the end in mind. How do we define “safe case closure?” And the result was rich conversation that focused on the work we share.

Once the trust and relationship is there, things just start happening. Instead of protecting who is “right” or “wrong” everyone’s energy is spent on innovation, problem solving and the future.

Let’s not talk about money…let’s talk about what we want to achieve.

Historically public and private agencies walked into meetings in our perceived roles: the state has a regulatory/compliance role and the private agency has the responsibility to fulfill a contract. Deciding that our first meeting would center around what we want to achieve and our shared responsibility to achieve a common objective kept us focused on what was important. By concentrating on the best way to keep kids safe, we were able to see how our roles compliment each other

When we prepared for the first meeting of the task force, we agreed: Let’s not talk about money – let’s talk about what we want to achieve.

Fortunately we both agreed this was the best approach for our first meeting. When we all came together for the first time - focused on the objective – something remarkable happened. We started out talking about the practice of keeping kids safe. That’s what we’re all about. That’s what we know.

In the room were two Chief Executive Officers of human service agencies, a program manager and two levels of DHS administrative personnel. The total years of experience in human services in that room tipped the scales, and we started our task of defining a pay structure by talking about best practice in keeping kids safe.

Another leg of the journey

The next collection of posts is a workgroup formed to address a specific issue. Evan represents the Iowa Dept. of Human Services and Doug represents a private agency.



First Things First

Another example of partnership in practice is the FSRP Safe & Timely Case Closure Workgroup.

Charged with a fast-track task, the team needed to perform an in-depth analysis of the current Family Safety Risk & Permanency (FSRP) contract configuration and recommend changes for the payment structure. The FSRP program is relatively new – it’s how we work with families that have documented abuse or neglect.

Key to our results was the decision to first take time to think through the best practices of keeping children safe. We realized we couldn’t talk about payments at all until we talked about how we work together so that we can jointly do the best job for Iowa’s kids and families.

Naturally, successful practice is first and foremost when we work in child welfare, but the public and private agencies had unique insight from their own perspectives. And that insight included what was going well…and what wasn’t.

Right – we had this great experience with finding out the best way to train staff and families on Family Interaction, and then it turned into other opportunities. We took the training and built it into DHS internal new worker training. Everyone was so excited about the success of the training, and the inclusive atmosphere, that we started thinking how this could translate into other areas.

We have these monthly meetings about contracts with providers (private agencies) and we try to problem solve. Well, after the Family Interaction trainings we thought, “A-ha!” and realized providers should be in on those meetings, too! Public and private agencies have the same goal: child safety, permanency and well-being. We have different experiences and different observations that can help us achieve that goal. Together.

It’s really spilled over into what we do every day. And that’s the whole purpose, right?

Wendy