Welfare Watch

Welfare Watch - June 4, 2009 - KidsNet, Changing the way Georgia Provides Care for at-risk Children and their Families

Since 2004 with a grant from the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA), Georgia has been reforming its system of care in child welfare and its mental health service delivery system. The purpose of the grant is to support the transformation of the State’s children and adolescent behavioral health system by strengthening and enhancing the capacity to develop, expand and sustain behavioral health services across all child-serving agencies for children and adolescents experiencing Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED), substance abuse and/or co-occurring disorders (COD) and their families. Another grant to the State from the same federal agency was given to enhance capacity to provide effective, accessible and affordable services to youth with SED, SA and COD and their families and to keep children from higher end placements. These two grants were later combined to strengthen their work. In 2007, the Governor's Office for Children and Families offered grants to providers to further the vision and goals of these systems of care models.

These grants are changing the way that Georgia thinks about delivery of services to at-risk children and their families. Georgia coined its own term for what was generally known as “System of Care.” We call ours “KidsNet.” KidsNet’s vision and objectives are as follows:

· Develop a shared vision/strategic plan for the development of an integrated statewide system across child-serving agencies for the delivery of behavioral health services to children/adolescents who experience Serious Emotional Disturbance (SED), substance abuse (SA) and co-occurring disorders (COD).

· Develop funding strategies to coordinate, improve and maximize capacity of statewide interagency child service systems.

· Develop and expand specially trained workforce with specialty knowledge in working with children and adolescents experiencing SED, SA and COD.

· Promote youth and family outreach and engagement in the design and implementation of the behavioral health service delivery system.

· Develop policy and practice guidelines that eliminate barriers, promote and support behavioral health service system improvements.

· Participate in and actively share learning with other state agencies/stakeholders and other States to leverage training, support, dissemination, intervention adoption and evaluation/research to improve the treatment system for youth and their families.

These goals can be compared to the old way of providing care by the following chart:

Old Way : Fragmented System, Child Focused, Problem based	New Way: Collaborative System, Family Focused, Strength based

Agencies know best	Families know best
Placement seen as a solution	Placement seen as a planned intervention
Enabling families	Empowering families
Meetings held at the agency’s convenience	Meetings held at the family’s convenience
Reduce public risk by removing the youth from the community	Reduce public risk by supporting the youth in the community
Children can grow up in out -of-home care	Children need to grow up in families
Direction flows from a centralized authority	Authority rests in community-based ownership
Creation of dependency	Creation of self-help & active participation
Child only focus	Whole family as the focus
Families perceived as “problem”	Families seen as partners & therapeutic allies
Cultural blindness	Cultural competence
Highly professionalized process followed	Coordination with informal & natural supports
An input-focused accountability	Outcome/results-oriented accountability
Fragmented service delivery	Coordinated service delivery

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Welfare Watch, an email newsletter of the

Georgia Association of Homes
and Services for Children
as a public service.
http://www.gahsc.org
Normer Adams, Editor
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