With the 15th Annual TCOM Conference around the corner, we wanted to give you a sneak peek look at some of this year’s presentations!
Casey Family Programs took time to answer some questions about their upcoming presentation, Engaging Staff in Improving and Advancing the CANS in Practice: Integrating TCOM Principles into Casey’s
Continuous Quality Improvement.
Q: What should individuals look forward to gaining from your presentation?
Our workshop is really two workshops packed into one session! At Casey, we are committed to becoming a trauma-and healing informed learning organization. Data-driven decision-making and continuous quality improvement are central to how we operate. In Child and Family Services, we are in our 6th year of CANS & FAST implementation. Our practices, processes, performance and outcome monitoring and feedback are partly driven by the CANS & FAST and are influenced by the TCOM philosophy.
We will be sharing two updates in our ongoing implementation of these efforts; (1) Our frontline staff & supervisor driven process that is critically reviewing our CANS & FAST, and related practices and data collection and assessment and action plan visualizations, that are shared with families and stakeholders. This has been part of an upgrade to our electronic case management (ECM) system that is planned to release in early 2020. We will be sharing our processes and anticipated changes from this work, including changes to our CANS reference guide, the pain-points Social Workers have experienced using our ECM and our plans to address them.
(2) An update in our ongoing efforts using our ECM data, including our CANS data, for predicting which youth are at greatest risks for aging out of our foster care program. Our hopes is that by identifying these youth and families earlier, we can change their services trajectory to more positive outcomes. We are early in our use of predictive, or as we say, precision, analytics, and we are trying to engage our staff in analyzing and applying these data through a collaborative story-telling process. This presentation will highlight how these efforts are part of our approach to CQI, provide an overview of their status, and we’ll share lessons learned along the way.
Q: What drew you to present on your specific topic?
At Casey, we believe that the collaborative approaches we are taking for improving our CANS & FAST, related practices, and analyzing and applying our data are consistent with the philosophies of TCOM. This has been an ongoing effort for us (that has been highlighted as past TCOM conferences, shared largely by our former Director of Data, Systems and Reporting, Stephen Shimshock, who is now part of the Praed team!), and we wanted to continue to share our story so that we can learn alongside others. We believe that by sharing, we can start conversations with others doing similar work. We invite this dialogue as it can be helpful for us, and others, to find ways to make possible improvements.
Q: What about the theme “Culture and Community: Sharing Stories from the Collaborative” resonates with you?
Addressing disproportionality and disparate outcomes, and anti-racism, are foundational values to Casey Family Programs. Being family-centered, relationship-based and culturally-responsive are core to our work. We view our practice with youth and families through a lens of cultural humility and try to engage, empower and elevate youth and family voice through teamwork. We also have a saying in Child and Family Services, “data speaks and stories teach, and it takes both to make a difference.” Joining in the collaborative give us a chance to hear the stories of others implementing CANS and TCOM. Our hope is to collaboratively learn!
Q: From your perspective, what role does storytelling play in the work you/we do?
Simply put, storytelling is central to our work. Youth and family’s individual stories beget an individualized and multidisciplinary team-driven approach to the work. We’ve also learned along the way that there is much we can learn as an organization from our frontline staff, youth, and families, in how to approach our challenges and opportunities. Lastly, our Social Workers are more likely to engage in our organizational improvement efforts when we find ways to successfully connect with them through stories about our practice.
You can see the Casey group and our many other presenters at the 15th Annual TCOM Conference! Click HERE to register today!
