Vol. 9, No. 1
October 2003

Templates to Help Child Welfare Supervisors Capture Data on Family-Centered Practice

Instructions

The templates below are intended to help child welfare supervisors gauge the family-centered strengths of individual child welfare workers. One template is for use with workers who do investigations and assessments of families. The other is for use with workers who do ongoing work with families. To download them, right-click on each file and choose "Save Target As."

These templates are in Microsoft Excel. Feel free to modify them to meet your needs. You may also wish to add different criteria. These templates are merely a starting place for your work with data of this type.

These templates are not intended for use in performance evaluations of individual workers. Instead, we hope they will help you and your workers gain insight into their strengths and needs, and enable you to focus your efforts on family-centered practice and achieving meaningful, positive outcomes for families.

Before they begin using these tools, supervisors and/or agency administrators will need to decide who is responsible for entering and verifying the data captured in these templates.

Users should also note that to assess the ability of units to achieve the various indicators it will be necessary to include all workers in the unit who do this type of work, even those who do not achieve the indicators. In other words, be sure every one is in the denominator.

We would be interested to know whether you find these templates useful, and if so, how you have used them. Please let us know by e-mailing johnmcmahon@mindspring.com.

Descriptions of the Different Fields in the Templates

Tables 1-6
Column A: WORKER#[NAME]
Enter in the names of the individual workers you supervise in column A.

Rows labeled: "Total number of families/children for whom this indicator was achieved, by month"
When you enter values for each worker in the monthly columns (B through M), the total number of families/children for whom this indicator was achieved during each particular month will be automatically calculated in this row.

Rows labeled: "Total families/children served by the unit, by month"
Enter the total number of families/children served by the unit for each month in this row.

Yellow Indicator Summary Boxes 1-6
Uses information in tables 1-6 to calculate the percentage of families/children served by the unit in a year for whom the different indicators were achieved.

Unit Performance Table
Uses information from tables1-6 to calculate the percentage of families/children served by the unit in a year for whom the different indicators were achieved.