Reimbursement and pay for performance in healthcare systems

Permanent Homes

Foster Care and Adoption

Priority: Protect Children from Abuse and Neglect and Connect Them to Caring Permanent Families.

A lot of money is mismanaged when it comes to investigating child abuse cases and placing abused or neglected children into foster care. Many times the families that take in these children do so to earn extra money from monthly foster care subsidies. They don't even spend that money on the betterment or maintenance of the child and instead spend it on themselves. This may not be the case for some foster parents, but it is often to true for many.

Furthermore, children placed in foster homes often only stay there for as little as a few weeks and have move from one foster care family to another. The constant placement of these children in different homes can have negative psychological effects not just on the children in their youth, but can carry out to the way they act and behave when they are adults. That is why it is important to advocate for better screening and psychological evaluations of foster families, in order to prevent mistreatment or neglect of a foster child.

Abuse is often seen in multiple generations of families. Seeing children placed in potentially harmful families after already being removed their toxic biological family will only exacerbate a child's issues. Poverty and education is important to deal with when it comes to children, but a sense of family safety, and stability, I feel that is the most important priority to discuss. Psychological problems stemming from unstable homes can have long running effects and can change dramatically all areas of a child's life from difficulty learning in school to handling stress.

B. AAP

The small scale project that would help immediately to deal with both ineffective foster care and alleged abusive homes is to create an assessment and action protocol. This assessment and action protocol or AAP, will comprise of a series of questions and tests that parents, both alleged abusive parents and foster parents can take to see whether or not they may exhibit any psychological issues and how they cope and handle with stress. Many times abusive parents are abusive because they can't handle their lives the way it is and lash out on their children. Finding out the state of these adult's lives and what kind of work they do, along with any family history, could really help determining not only if these people are abusive or potentially abusive, but could also offer ways to generate viable solutions.

Assessment is one part, the other is action. Once assessment is performed, action can comprise of one or two sets of actions. The first set is if the parents/foster parents interviewed are abusive or are potentially abusive. If they are, then steps can involve removing the child from the home or banning the parents from fostering children and placing the child in temporary care. In the case of abusive biological parents, a court ordered search warrant of the parents' home can reveal any potential instances of abuse or illegal substances, allowing the government to step in and either arrest or offer a rehabilitation/learning program to better their ability to handle children and their lives.

The other set of actions involve determining no instance of abuse or identifying suitable foster families. Actions would include one additional follow-up as needed or bi-monthly follow ups in the case of foster parents. AAP can be done with little to no additional funding, just simply training staff to properly assess and act on these types of cases. The target population, abusive parents and foster parents who house abused children and foster children, will be better managed through AAP because staff will have more ability to evaluate situations and have more control in how to identify and handle actual abuse cases. Lastly, because good foster care families will be more easily identified, children will be able to good homes faster and have a chance at getting adopted.

C. Idea

This idea will work because it is already implemented to some degree. However, the actions and assessment are not streamlined. Streamlining these things will make investigating cases more efficient and less time consuming. Also, it does not take much, if any funding in order to start. It simply takes additional training, which can be done in 6 months and supervising employees during their first visits under the new protocol.

D. Target Community

The targeted community can start off small, for instance, it can be in hard hit areas like the Bronx in NYC. Many cases of abuse and neglect have been reported there and the foster care system in the Bronx needs to be modified. Although cases such as these may appear in all the boroughs, the Bronx has the highest case load and the least ability or resources to handles these cases. It can even be done in one section of the Bronx, the South Bronx, first in order to keep everything manageable.

E. Policies

H.R. 3205: Promoting Adoption and Legal Guardianship for Children in Foster Care Act was introduced Sep 27, 2013 and Passed House on Oct 22, 2013. What it does is it helps foster children have better chances of getting adopted by their foster families. The bill offers more financial incentive to suitable foster families to adopt foster children. This can be helpful for AAP because once a good foster family is identified, the incentive can help increase the overall likelihood of adoption. People often do not do things for free. It is expensive to raise a child. So offering additional incentives to parents looking to foster but not adopt, may help create more availability of permanent homes to foster children.

F. Collaboration

The National Foster Parent Association or NFPA, is an organization that promoted permanent homes for children through foster care. They can help people screening foster parents understand what it takes to be a good foster parent and provides cases of instances where children were adopted from foster care. Organizations like these can also raise awareness on the need for good foster families and help promote good parenting skills. Lastly, they can share resources and provide valuable statistics on bad and good foster family cases from over several years in any area.