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The Best Practice Project is a multi-year, intensive effort to develop a practice model which emphasizes child safety, permanency, and well-being from intake to case closure. The BP Vision of the future includes:
- Consistent investigative and casework practice statewide;
- A constant focus on risk and safety, permanency and well-being;
- Permanency achieved for children within 24 months through skilled use of concurrent planning, use of comprehensive assessments and treatment paths, purposeful child and family team meetings, and frequent supervisory conferences;
- Interventions from Day 1 to case closure clearly tied to a family's safety and risk issues; and
- Foster parents involved as more than substitute caregivers - also viewed as critical part of the child welfare team.
Best Practice incorporates all of the requirements of the federal Adoption and Safety Families Act, the Illinois Permanency Initiative, OIG recommendations, business standards, laws and regulations, consent decrees, accreditation requirements, and principles of sound child welfare practice. The effort has provided a means in which to analyze and reform Department protocols and systems to ensure that services to families are of the highest quality and are consistently provided statewide. Increasingly, the Department is using the new practice model to guide organizational change, including all policy development and training as well as implementation of the new Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS).
A panel of external experts has been appointed to review all Best Practice materials and to make ongoing recommendations which will ensure that the Department's practices continue to be consistent with the most current research.
Best practice builds on what the Department began through implementation of permanency legislation and accreditation. The concepts will seem familiar to staff as many of the principles have already been used in various parts of the state. The Best Practice project brings those principles together in a way that can be consistently carried out statewide and can help the families we serve to achieve the best outcomes
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