Welcome to OCFS' Child Welfare Program and Practice Improvement data profile web pages.
New York State is committed to improving outcomes for children and families who come to the attention of the child welfare system. One strategy is the use of data to efficiently and effectively promote program and practice improvement. This web page is one of several efforts OCFS is undertaking to promote transparency and public accountability in the area of child welfare outcomes. Child welfare is a complex system to understand and while data can point to its strengths and weaknesses there are limitations in using it to draw conclusions about overall practice. Child welfare services in New York State are state-supervised and locally administered by 57 counties, the City of New York and the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. New York State is one of only thirteen states in the country that administers its child welfare services through a county based structure, i.e., local departments of social services. OCFS provides oversight to the local social service districts and licenses over 100 private, not for profit voluntary agencies which may provide preventive, foster care, adoption and post adoption services under contract with local districts.
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These pages are an important part of the program improvement effort in that they intend to achieve three different but related purposes.
1) To provide local departments of social services and other community partners with historical data on their programs for purposes of program improvement planning, developing hypotheses and tracking results.
2) To engage Stakeholders by sharing key profile and outcome measures in order to better inform them as well as the general public about child welfare, and
3) To enhance accountability to the children, families and communities.
These three goals will lay the foundation for the development of a collaborative process for identifying and sharing efforts that have demonstrated effectiveness in improving outcomes for children and families.
Program Improvement Planning
Counties across New York State have a significant history of program improvement work. Remarkable innovations in program design and management (e.g. Genesee County's Cluster Foster Homes, Onondaga County's Family Support Center, NYC Improved Outcomes for Children and ChildStat to identify only a few) have grown organically from this pursuit. The increasing emphasis on results and outcomes combined with the program improvement planning approach offered through the Federal Child and Family Service Review (CFSR) structure and the Continuous Quality Improvement approach employed by New York State and most counties provides greater discipline and a shared platform from which lessons can be learned, documented and shared. For more info on CQI: http://muskie.usm.maine.edu/helpkids/rcpdfs/CQIFramework.pdf. The data on these pages provides a critical starting point for program improvement.
Questions about these data or feedback about the pages may be directed to info@ocfs.state.ny.us