Casey Family Services' newly published Clinical Model and Principles synthesizes more than 30 years of best practices developed to provide foster care services to children and families in need. The result is a comprehensive guide that applies these principles to the daily reality of service provision throughout both the Casey organization and the larger child welfare community.

The clinical model expands upon Casey's overarching goal – achieving good family and child outcomes through the delivery of high-quality, cost-effective, family-centered services – by clearly defining the clinical principles that must energize every casework activity from intake and assessment to after-care and case closure.

By emphasizing the following clinical principles:

• permanency, safety and well-being of children and families
• honoring and nurturing birth family connections
• family-centered activities
• individualized and strengths-based programs
• culture
• outcomes
• collaboration
• continuity of relationships and
• community

As the direct service arm of the Annie E. Casey Foundation, Casey Family Services has grown from a single-site, single-focus agency to today's seven-state organization with more than 300 staff serving over 4,000 children, families and communities. Casey's resulting experience and knowledge have proved invaluable to many other public and private agencies, which regularly seek technical assistance and research-based insights.

Casey's Clinical Model and Principles is further demonstration of this long tradition, and forms both the philosophical and operational basis for each division's ongoing services to children and families, as well as the organization's continuing efforts to disseminate best practices to the wider public and private service community.

The model emphasizes the need for a stable therapeutic environment that will ensure effective services and supports to children and families. It stresses the criteria necessary to help each child and family reach their maximum potential. It encourages collaboration of birth and foster families, outside agencies and community support to achieve best outcomes. The principles contained in the model apply to all Casey programs, whether family preservation and support, family reunification, treatment foster care, long-term foster care, post-adoption or family resource centers.

The Clinical Model and Principles are the energizing foundation for Casey's computerized Case Information System (CIS), which is now rolling out its first pilot program for foster care service delivery at Casey's Rhode Island Division. Other divisions are expected to begin implementing the program later this year. Future planned expansions of the CIS system will apply to other Casey service areas including family-based programs and family resource center work.

"CIS will enable us to better understand our work, measure our achievement, and provide tangible assistance to other provider agencies," says Casey Family Services Executive Director Raymond L. Torres.

"The CIS program puts Casey's Clinical Model and Principles into real-world practice by standardizing and measuring the delivery of foster care services so that Casey's work can be replicated internally and disseminated to the field at large. The CIS enables direct care staff to complete assessments, service plans, case reviews, case contacts, and closure/aftercare plans using the same automated format," says Casey's Director of Clinical Services Eliot Brenner. "When this is completed, Casey will be able to identify some of the key factors that influence outcomes in safety, permanency and well-being."