At the New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), safety means protecting children from abuse and neglect as well as unnecessary separation from their families. Our decisions have life-altering implications for New York City’s children. The stakes could not be higher, and that’s why we’re always looking to learn from and improve upon our work.
We’ve recently convened a new Multidisciplinary Review Panel of experts in the field to help us in this effort. This new panel builds upon the efforts we already have underway to create and sustain a safety culture — a culture across our organization and system of learning and improvement.
Organizations with a strong sense of safety culture encourage open communication. At ACS, that means our dedicated staff working every day to protect children from harm — both in the agency and among our partner organizations — are empowered to raise their voices if they believe a practice or decision is unsafe. And it means that no one should ever feel compelled to make a critical decision based on fear of blame rather than on the facts of the case.
Nearly each week over the past 20 years, more than 500 staff members assemble for ChildStat sessions, 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. Every month, we also publish a data report, called the ACS Flash, so that advocates and other stakeholders can hold us accountable for our outcomes.
More recently, we have established expert coaching to assure strong and supportive staff supervision; strengthened our training academy to teach essential skills; reduced caseloads so staff have time to work closely with families and children; spurred creation of staff-driven “local action teams” to promote safety initiatives in units across the city; launched a new Leadership Development Institute to teach leaders how to build a culture where accountability thrives over blame; and repeatedly surveyed staff and held frequent internal town halls to hear their concerns and ideas.
We have seen more children remain safely with their families over the past several years. For those children who were not safe at home and whom ACS had to place in foster care, we have increased our rate of timely reunification while lowering the number of children who need to reenter care.
We see signs that staff are feeling this shift in culture. In the midst of staffing challenges across human services, we have seen the opposite here, with steady improvements in the number of child protective specialists: Today, we have nearly 200 more on active duty compared to two years ago, helping us maintain caseloads well below national standards.
When a child known to ACS dies or is severely injured, we focus diligently on learning from that tragedy to identify ways to prevent others from being at risk in the future. ACS investigates every fatality of a New York City child that is reported to the state hotline with allegations of possible abuse or maltreatment. We complete a comprehensive review of every child fatality where the family was known to ACS within the last decade.
The review includes an analysis of case records and, for cases with more recent ACS involvement, human factors debriefings with involved staff to identify and implement potential system improvements. This approach is built on methods common in the medical field and in other safety-intensive industries.
Our new Multidisciplinary Review Panel brings experts external to ACS into the process to help identify systemic solutions that will enhance ACS’s ability to protect children and deliver high-quality services. The panel includes a group of esteemed child welfare stakeholders, including those in the fields of child abuse pediatrics, mental health, law enforcement, accident prevention, parent advocacy, community-based services and more. Through a state-approved process, it will have access to confidential case information which can help panelists gain insight into our practice and help our learning.
Using this approach allows us to maintain privacy for families, especially siblings, while creating even more transparency into our practices. We look forward to learning from the panel’s expertise to strengthen practice, policy, and information sharing. We hope it l will also help New Yorkers better understand our work as we promote systemic transparency, accountability and improvement. To these ends, their recommendations will be incorporated into our annual public fatality review report.
The new panel builds on the tremendous work of our internal review teams, and of our many long-standing partners who have contributed to important changes in recent years. For instance, because we’ve seen that the two most common categories for preventable child fatalities are accidents and sleep-related injuries, we created a dedicated Office of Child Safety and Injury Prevention that makes sure families know the safest way to put their babies to sleep, to put window guards in their homes, and to safely store potentially toxic household products including prescription drugs and cannabis edibles out of the reach of children.
We have flagged aspects of mental health care that have posed critical challenges for our investigative teams, spurring increased training and support in key areas, including the identification and treatment of perinatal mood and anxiety disorders, and the coordination of assistance for parents who are coping with severe depression and isolation.
When it comes to the safety and the future of the city’s children and the success of its families, we will not rest. Through cultivating a safety culture and always striving for excellence, ACS continues to find new ways, like the Multidisciplinary Review Panel, to strengthen our work.
————————————————