By Chris Beerits
DHHS Child Welfare Services has committed to a rigorous effort to
meet national accreditation standards for public agency child
welfare programs. Developed by the Council on Accreditation (COA),
these standards have been continuously revised and improved over a
30-year period. Numerous private organizations in Maine are already
accredited by the COA.
Because COA standards provide an excellent
blueprint for a strong child welfare program, accreditation will
enable DHHS Child Welfare Services to strengthen and improve recent
reforms in several ways:
- Through COA Accreditation, staff and leadership become more
true to their Practice Model. “How we do our work is as
important as the work we do.”
- Accreditation affords leadership the opportunity to engage
all staff and for everyone to have a voice in improving
performance and quality of services to children and their
families.
- Accreditation will further guide Maine’s Child Welfare
Program toward excellence:
- A system that is safe and gets good outcomes for children
and their families.
- An organization committed to quality from bottom to top and
top to bottom.
- Staff who connect with children and their families, their
conditions and their needs.
- Accreditation helps ensure that employees have the skills
and training they need to provide services and ensure clearly
defined criteria to evaluate personnel performance.
- Accreditation helps ensure ongoing procedures to identify
problem areas and make necessary changes and improvements to the
organization.
Accreditation helps ensure processes to plan for adverse
situations and effectively manage risk.
- Accreditation will enable Maine Child Welfare Services to
meet broader DHHS outcomes expected from all parts of the
organization.
Some staff speak of COA accreditation as “taking Maine’s
Child Welfare reform effort to the next level.”
Jim Beougher, Director of the Office of Child and Family
Services (OCFS), and Dan Despard, Acting Director of Child
Welfare Services at OCFS, have created two Accreditation Self
Study Committees to rate how well the organization is presently
implementing COA standards and to recommend changes where
needed. Two foster parents, Barbara Ford of Winterport and
Shirley Melancon of Starks, serve on the committee which rates
child welfare services.
By December 2006 the work groups of the self study committees
had rated Maine’s implementation of COA standards. In January
and February 2007, child welfare management made many decisions
to strengthen the child welfare program, based on these
recommendations. The work to implement these decisions has now
been assigned and is expected to take a year to complete.
DHHS Child Welfare Services hopes to make enough improvements
to be able to submit their self study to COA by early 2008. COA
reviewers would then visit the DHHS central offices and all
eight DHHS districts in the spring and summer of 2008 to
validate implementation of COA standards. As part of this
review, they will want to talk to foster parents.
Chris Beerits, who recently retired as Deputy Director of
Child Welfare Services at OCFS, is now working at the Child
Welfare Training Institute to support this massive accreditation
effort by OCFS Child Welfare Services by providing coordination.
If you are interested in more information about accreditation,
you can contact Chris Beerits at cbeerits@usm.maine.edu. You can
also check out the web sites of the Council on Accreditation at
www.coanet.org and www.coastandards.org.
