Creating and Implementing an Evidence Informed Intervention to Enhance the Quality of Supervised Parent/Child Visits

One of the primary duties of Child Welfare Services (CWS) is to provide services to families to prevent the risk of future child maltreatment and to safely reunify children with their parents. Recent efforts have promoted the use of evidence based practice; however, the evidence used to support these programs has typically been gathered in fields other than CWS and the effectiveness of these programs with CWS involved families is uncertain. An additional challenge with taking an established intervention and attempting to fit it into CWS is the potential mismatch of the service with the existing service provision and casework structure of CWS. Our program was set up to draw on the available evidence as well as to create an intervention that could be integrated into the structure of CWS. To achieve this goal, a partnership was created between the local state CWS and a public university. The first phase of the project involved a review of the existing literature on parenting interventions and conducting focus groups and interviews to assess the needs of CWS involved families. The information garnered guided the development of an intervention designed specifically for the needs of the CWS and the families they serve. The initial component, currently being piloted, is a curriculum based parent coaching intervention for parents who have recently had their children removed from their care and are visiting their child(ren) in a supervised setting.  The focus is on enhancing the quality and experience of visits for parents and children (birth to 8) with an intervention that involves 15 sessions of one-on-one time between the parent and a parent coach, and coaching during parent-child visitation. The program is designed to be modular so that parents will only receive those sessions for which it appears they will most benefit.  Preliminary pretest usability data indicate that parents and coaches like and find the program useful, parents come prepared for visits and coaches report progress not typically seen so early in a case. Data from the pilot will presented along with lessons learned regarding CWS implementation prior to embarking on a randomized controlled test. Ultimately, the program is intended to be "open source", with the materials needed to conduct the program available at no cost via the internet.