Vol. 24, No. 2
May 2019

Practical Suggestions for Strengthening Assessments of Safety and Risk

Assessing safety and risk is complex. In search of insights and strategies to help agencies strengthen their practice in this area, Practice Notes spoke with Emi Wyble. Ms. Wyble has held many direct service and leadership roles in her 30-year Social Services career, including in the areas of CPS Intake, Assessments, In-Home, Foster Care, and training. Now a Social Services Program Representative with the NC Division of Social Services, she provides technical assistance to counties with identified child welfare needs.

Note: the following are only suggestions--nothing below is required.

How can we strengthen assessments of safety and risk?

Pre-planning is one practice I'd encourage. This means staff meet with their supervisor to plan cases before they go out to the field. Child welfare work should not be done in isolation. Even though a worker typically goes out alone, that doesn't mean they do the job alone. (Click here for a brief guide to pre-planning.)

Pre-planning allows the worker and supervisor to talk about safety issues they may encounter based on what's been reported. It's a chance to discuss things you might want to be aware of or look into.

Doing a narrative interview with a child is also helpful. This technique gets them to really tell their story so we gather as much information as we can to fully assess a child's safety and risk. (North Carolina child welfare staff can learn this approach by taking Child Forensic Interviewing. Starting in fall 2019, it will also be taught in the course CPS Assessments.)

My last tip would be to call in the safety assessment from the field. When you've met with a family and identified items to include in the safety assessment, before you wrap that up, step out and call a supervisor and review that safety assessment.

Right up front, you're sharing the responsibility of safety with a supervisor. This practice also gives the supervisor the opportunity to determine: Do you have enough information to say you address all the allegations? Have you fully initiated that case? Do you have the information you need to create a safety assessment? Does your assessment really address the safety issues present for this child? Or does your supervisor need to help you strengthen the plan to address the safety threat identified by the assessment?

Then you can go back to the family and say, "After talking this over with my supervisor, I'd like to discuss these changes to the safety assessment." And see how the family responds.

Does this require extra skill and rapport with the family?
What I would have staff say is, "I'm the one that's out here meeting with you. But I don't do this in isolation. So I'm going to be transparent with you. I'm going to be transparent with my supervisor. I'm going to share a summary of what we've discussed here. Then my supervisor is going to give me feedback and let me know if they're hearing anything differently than I hear it. And then I'll meet with you again and we'll talk more about that."

In a situation where you've got "safe with a plan," there is no reason not to be transparent. We need to engage families to help them keep children safe. The alternative is you do a poorly-developed safety plan, your supervisor signs it the next day or looks at it the next day and says, "This is insufficient. Go back out to the family."

It's much better to say up front, "One of the reasons we do this is, if it's not sufficient, I would have to come right back out here again. So to prevent that I staff it with a supervisor, we make sure everything is OK, and then we'll discuss signing it."

It saves time. And keeps kids safe.

Do workers ever resist adopting this practice?
You would think staff, especially senior staff, would say, "I don't need to do that. I know how to write a safety assessment. I don't need anybody's help."

But it's explained to them: "This is about sharing the responsibility of safety. I will not put you out there alone. I'm here to back you up, as your supervisor."

When staff hear "Safety is a shared responsibility," all of a sudden it's like, "Oh yeah, that's OK. I'll call you every time I'm out in the field." And they really do take to it and start to see it as: "You're here to back me up. It's not that you distrust me. It's that we're doing this together."

I always tell staff that child welfare is one of the hardest jobs ever. I think it's one of the best jobs in the world. But it's one of the hardest jobs ever. Why would we push you out there in isolation?

I think safety and risk is hard, and it's the most important job we do. We just need to take our time and really listen to the kids and gather all the information we can.

Sometimes I think it's hard for us to reconcile in our heads that people do really hurt children. We have to open our minds that sometimes this really does happen and we've got to hear what the children say to us.