Your guide to NYC's public proceedings.
AGENCY TESTIMONY
Child safety measures and organizational culture improvements
3:13:53
ยท
3 min
Commissioner Dannhauser outlines ACS's efforts to improve child safety measures and foster a culture of learning and accountability within the organization.
- Focus on protecting children from abuse, neglect, and avoidable separation from families
- Implementation of a 'safety culture' approach to decision-making and staff development
- Weekly 'child stats' sessions involving 500+ staff to review performance and dive deep into case practice
- Monthly publication of 'ACS Flash' data report for transparency and accountability
- Improvements in staff retention and caseload management
- Introduction of a new multidisciplinary review panel for child fatality cases
- Enhanced fatality review process to identify systemic improvements
Jess Dannhauser
3:13:53
For ACS safety means protecting children from the harms of abuse and neglect, as well as from the harms of avoidable separation from their families.
3:14:01
It is our obligation to get it right every time on every case and to learn the right lessons when we do not.
3:14:08
To do this we need to nurture a wide ranging organizational culture of learning and improvement.
3:14:13
We refer to it as safety culture.
3:14:15
To help our CPS make the best possible decisions for children and families we provide expert coaching to assure strong and supportive staff supervision, strengthen our training academy to teach essential skills, reduce caseloads so staff have time to work closely with families and children, and launched a new leadership development institute to teach leaders how to build a culture where accountability thrives, not blame.
3:14:38
Each week more than 500 staff assemble for child stats sessions, we had nearly 700 this morning, where we review key performance indicators and dive deep into case practice, helping us make improvements in each local child protection office and implement system wide changes when necessary.
3:14:54
Every month we also publish a data report called the ACS Flash so that advocates and other stakeholders are aware of and can hold us accountable for our outcomes.
3:15:03
We've seen more children remain safely in their families over the past several years.
3:15:07
For those children who were not safe at home and were placed in foster care, we have increased our rate of timely reunification while lowering the number of children who need to reenter care.
3:15:16
We see signs that staff are feeling this shift in culture.
3:15:19
In the midst of staffing challenges across human services, we have seen the opposite here.
3:15:24
With steady improvements in the number of child protective specialists retained.
3:15:28
Today we have nearly 200 more on active duty handling child protective responses compared to two years ago, helping us maintain case loads well below national standards.
3:15:41
Moreover, when a critical incident involves a child occurs, we focus relentlessly on learning from that tragedy to identify ways to prevent others from being at risk in the future.
3:15:50
ACS investigates every fatality of a New York City child that is reported to the state hotline with allegations of possible abuse or maltreatment.
3:15:57
We complete a comprehensive review of every child fatality where the family was known to ACS within the last decade.
3:16:02
The review includes an analysis of case records and for more recent cases human factors debriefings with involved staff to identify and implement potential system improvements.
3:16:12
This approach is built on methods common in the medical field and other safety intensive industries.
3:16:18
I recently convened a new multidisciplinary review panel to bring experts external to ACS into the fatality review process to help identify systemic solutions that will enhance ACS's ability to protect children and deliver high quality services.
3:16:32
The panel includes a group of esteemed experts and child welfare stakeholders.
3:16:37
It includes those with lived experience, folks in child abuse, pediatrics, mental health, law enforcement, accident prevention, parent advocacy, community based services and more.
3:16:50
The panel gives us a formal pathway to incorporate their expertise and strengthen practice policy information sharing and more.
3:16:57
I'm grateful to our fellow city agencies who have joined that panel including the medical examiner, the Department of Health, the NYPD and others.
3:17:05
We hope this panel will also help New Yorkers better understand our work as we promote systemic transparency and system accountability.