Building Evidence in Child Welfare Systems Workforce Development: Are We Ready?

A group of scholars propose a joint roundtable offered by the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute (NCWWI), the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD), and the Capacity Building Center for Tribes (CBC for Tribes) that are all working with numerous state, county and tribal jurisdictions in the US to address child welfare workforce improvement. Roundtable presenters will describe evidence informed approaches used in working with sites to improve their workforces. These approaches include methods to identify gaps, plan and implement strategies to build system capacity, and adapt or develop workforce interventions. They are, in turn, coupled with strong integrated evaluation designs. This roundtable will provide participants with a clear understanding of the kinds of readiness assessment processes carried out by these entities with child welfare programs. This includes utilization of key readiness and organizational culture and climate assessment measures to understand more about the context of workforce issues and the readiness of leadership and staff to engage in a change process or to implement an evidence informed intervention to improve retention. The roundtable will also focus on use of needs assessments, culturally-responsive engagement, data mining, and root cause analyses to understand the underlying workforce issues facing jurisdictions. Presenters will discuss how these methods can also be used to establish baselines to support initial phases of implementation and set the stage for rigorous evaluations. This roundtable draws on the experience of the presenters in applying these approaches to assess implementation readiness for child welfare systems that are attempting to address systemic workforce and practice issues. The other ingredient of the roundtable is to expose participants to the challenges of simultaneously developing and balancing the use of root cause analyses, assessment of workforce needs, and identifying leverage points for evidence supported interventions that are most likely to achieve workforce improvement. Participants will be exposed to readiness assessment as informed by the experience with multiple sites, readiness data collection and analysis, adaptation of workforce interventions, and the general challenges associated with integrating evaluation, as well as, collective lessons learned about strategies that support sites in their use of assessment findings and development of action plans.