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.

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?