Development and implementation of a native American cultural child welfare practice model and data system.

Paper #1959 presented at #husITa14 in Melbourne, Australia in July 2014.

Presenters

Mary A. Lannone (University of Texas at Arlington, USA).

Abstract

For Native American children, there is no national source of data on children and families served by tribal child welfare agencies, the extent of abuse and neglect, or the number of children in foster care. Native American children represented 0.9% of all children in the United States in the late 1990s but they comprised 3.1% of the substitute care population (Morrison, et al., 2010).

This presentation will showcase a baseline Child Welfare Practice Framework, Critical Questions for Developing a Cultural Practice Model, Applying the Child Welfare Practice Model to Data System Design and Lessons Learned from a collaborative implementation of a data system across three tribal child welfare agencies. In a national assessment of Native American tribes in the United States of America one of the most prominent needs indicated was the lack of data systems (NRC4Tribes, 2011) to assist tribes practice decision making. The 565 Native American tribes have varying capacity to manage and administer child welfare programs

In order to develop a data system to inform practice and policy, practices and procedures needed to be standardized with the 3 Tribes accepted for the implementation projects. The implementation projects for the tribal child welfare agencies used a two phases methodology; First, the projects would develop and put into practice a documented, culturally responsive policy, practice, and procedural manual. Second, the project would develop a management information system to support data-driven decision making for the individual communities.

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