National Quality Improvement Center for Collaborative Community Court Teams
Funded By: Administration on Children, Youth and Families – Children’s Bureau
QIC-CCCT staff and consultants—from April 2018 to September 2021—worked extensively with 14 sites to design, implement, and test approaches to support infants, parents, and caregivers affected by prenatal substance exposure. The two briefs highlight the efforts of these collaborative court teams to support and improve safety, permanency, well-being, and recovery outcomes for infants, families, and caregivers—while accomplishing the goals of the QIC-CCCT.
The Program Summary Brief focuses on implementation strategies, accomplishments, and lessons. The Evaluation Summary Brief highlights quantitative cross-site evaluation findings. Both briefs will help inform collaborative partners to improve systems and services for infants and parents affected by prenatal substance exposure.
For more information about the initiative, or to access other QIC-CCCT resources, please visit our website.
Piloting Plans of Safe Care: Examples from Ohio’s QIC-CCCT Counties 2018-2020
This resource features plans of safe care (POSC) pilots from three Ohio counties—all of whom received implementation funding from 2018-2020 through the National Quality Improvement Center for Collaborative Community Court Teams (QIC-CCCT). Children and Family Futures (CFF), which managed the 3-year cooperative agreement from the Children’s Bureau, provided technical assistance (TA) to 14 demonstration sites, including training, annual grantee meetings, and opportunities for cross-site learning. Engagement in the QIC-CCCT program enabled collaborative teams to convene, lead, and participate in cross-system work to implement POSC. Their experiences varied significantly depending on each community’s existing resources, funding to support [...]
Tribal Family Wellness Plan Learning Modules
Tribal Family Wellness Plan Learning Modules The Quality Improvement Center for Collaborative Community Court Team’s Tribal Family Wellness Plan Learning Modules prepared in collaboration with the Tribal Law and Policy Institute (TLPI), are designed to guide tribally driven collaboratives seeking to reduce the impact of substance abuse on pregnant and parenting families, improve systems and services to reduce prenatal substance exposure, prevent the separation of families, and support infant and family wellness.
Earlier the Better: How Court Teams are Supporting Infants and Parents Affected by Prenatal Substance Exposure
Date: September 28th, 2021 Speakers: Ken DeCerchio (CCFF), Terri Tobin (AHP) Description: This webinar shares key lessons and outcomes from the National Quality Improvement Center for Collaborative Community Court Teams’ (QIC-CCCT) engagement with 14 collaborative court teams. Over the last three years, QIC-CCCT demonstration sites worked intensively to design, implement, and test approaches to support infants with prenatal substance exposure and their parents or caregivers affected by substance use disorders. This webinar features the results of this work, including the role of collaborative court teams in implementing Plans of Safe Care, supporting mothers and families during [...]
QIC-CCCT Final Program and Evaluation Briefs
From April 2018 to December 2020 Quality Improvement Center for Collaborative Community Court Team (QIC-CCCT) staff and consultants worked intensively with 14 sites to design, implement, and test approaches to support infants, parents, and caregivers affected by prenatal substance exposure. The two briefs highlight the efforts of these collaborative court teams to enhance and expand their capacity to support and improve safety, permanency, well-being, and recovery outcomes for infants, families, and caregivers—while accomplishing the goals of the QIC-CCCT. The Program Summary Brief focuses on implementation strategies, accomplishments, and lessons. The Evaluation Summary Brief highlights quantitative cross-site evaluation [...]
Peer Recovery Staff’s Role in Engaging Families and Supporting their Recovery Journey
Peer Recovery Staff’s Role in Engaging Families and Supporting their Recovery Journey Peer Recovery Support staff with lived experience play a critical role in engaging and supporting parents and pregnant women with substance use disorders. In this four-part video series, you will hear Peer Recovery Support staff from Quality Improvement Center from Collaborative Court Team demonstration sites discuss their personal journeys from program participants to program staff and court team member, and how they support families in their own recovery journey. The videos can help professionals from child welfare, courts, substance use disorder treatment, and [...]
The Judge’s Role in Prevention: Implementing Plans of Safe Care
Initiative: The National Quality Improvement Center for Collaborative Community Court Teams Description: This video featuring Judge Peggy Walker draws on her experience as the presiding judge of the Douglas County Georgia Family Treatment Court and discusses the judge’s role in improving systems of care for infants with prenatal substance exposure and their families, implementing Plans of Safe Care, and preventing family separation. The video provides practical, experience-based guidance that professionals from child welfare, courts, substance use disorder treatment and other family-serving agencies can use to improve the health and well-being of infants and their families affected [...]
QIC-CCCT Evaluation Webinar: What Does the Data Tell Us So Far?
Date: January 26th, 2021 Speakers: Terri Tobin (AHP), Jen Carpenter (AHP), Lisa Lundquist (AHP) Description: The QIC-CCCT evaluation seeks to generate knowledge about how and to what extent demonstration sites improved child welfare and treatment outcomes, implemented the CARA amendments to CAPTA and Plans of Safe Care, built and sustained effective collaboration, and developed comprehensive and family centered service arrays. The QIC-CCCT evaluation team will share progress towards this goal and preliminary findings from the last two and half years of quantitative and qualitative data collection from across the 14 QIC-CCCT demonstration sites. Downloads: Webinar Slides [...]
Case Law Review – Prenatal Substance Exposure
This body of case law represents a robust discussion of legal issues surrounding prenatal substance exposure in civil child protection cases across the country. The variation in analysis from different jurisdictions illustrates how this area of child protection law presents many challenges and varied decision-making across courts. The goal of this case law summary is to help the field understand how different courts have approached these legal issues to establish greater uniformity when addressing prenatal substance use cases in the future. The first document (Policy Considerations Brief) will help policymakers and others in the field identify potential negative [...]
Serving Native Families Affected by Substance Use Disorder: Active Efforts and Plans of Safe Care
Date: June 30th, 2020 Speakers: Ken DeCerchio (Deputy Project Director, National Quality Improvement Center for Collaborative Community Court Teams) Suzanne Garcia (Tribal Law and Policy Institute) Stephanie Weldon (Yurok Health and Human Services) Alita Redner (Yurok Health and Human Services) Description: Substance use disorders among pregnant women and the number of infants born with prenatal substance exposure continues to rise. To address this, the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act (CAPTA) requires that states develop Plans of Safe Care and have policies and procedures to address the needs of this population. Presenters briefly discuss the CAPTA requirements, [...]
Conveying Your Message – Strategies for Promoting Your Program
Download the Conveying Your Message TA Tool Date: 6/24/2020 Speaker: Tara L. Kunkel, MSW Description: Conveying the message of your program is an essential part of sustainability and growth. The story you tell needs to convey the value of your program to the families you serve, community stakeholders, and policy makers in a way that justifies resources and inspires change. While we inherently know the importance of communicating the impact and value of our work, we seldom invest the time to develop a communication plan and marketing materials to talk about our program. This webinar will introduce [...]
Plans of Safe Care: An Issue Brief for Judicial Officers
Judicial officers hear a broad variety of dependency matters from a unique vantage point. This often requires insight and education in areas beyond the law such as substance use, mental health, and infant health and development. This briefing paper is intended to assist judicial officers presiding over collaborative community court teams better understand Plans of Safe Care (POSC), and their role in implementing POSC and bringing together community partners to improve systems for infants with prenatal substance exposure and their families.
Reasonable and Active Efforts, and Substance Use Disorders: A Toolkit for Professionals Working with Families in or at Risk of Entering the Child Welfare System
A toolkit for professionals working with families in or at risk of entering the child welfare system. The QIC-CCCT developed the Reasonable Efforts, Active Efforts and Substance Use Disorders Toolkit to help address some of the challenges presented in making reasonable and active efforts and related judicial findings in cases involving substance use. The toolkit provides definitions, statutory requirements, examples of reasonable and active efforts, and a resource guide for further reading.
Supporting Recovery and Reunification
Speaker: Dr. Lynne Katz Description: Dr. Lynne Katz highlights a collaborative response strategy developed by the University of Miami’s Linda Ray Intervention Center to support families in recovery as they transition out of residential treatment and reunify with their children. Recognizing that reunification support is essential to stabilizing the whole family through this transition and that families may go through multiple complex phases as they reunite, the UM team consists of an early Intervention specialist and an infant mental health clinician. They partner with the care coordinator/recovery specialists from the substance use disorder treatment provider to jointly [...]
From Policy to Practice: Comprehensive and Coordinated Family-Centered Treatment for Families Affected by Substance Use Disorders
Speaker: Dr. Hendrée Jones Description: Join Dr. Hendrée Jones for a discussion about the use of family-centered treatment when serving pregnant and parenting women with substance use disorders and their families. Dr. Jones will present about the importance of care coordination and systems integration for the whole family, including building relationships and linkages with healthcare providers, sharing information across systems, and addressing concerns about confidentiality. Highlights include: Outline the components of residential family-based treatment for substance abuse included in the 2018 Family First Prevention Services Act. Present outpatient and residential family-centered treatment model programs and the strategies [...]
QIC-CCCT REDCap Webinar
Description: Would you like to learn more about the Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) system and how it may benefit your program? In this session, we give an overview of this secure web platform (developed at Vanderbilt University under a federal NIH grant, free for non-profits, used in over 3,900 institutions in 135 countries) and how it allows you to build, manage, and use online databases and collect virtually any type of data (including 21 CFR Part 11, FISMA, and HIPAA-compliant environments) for any purpose.
QIC-CCCT Integrating Continuous Quality Improvement into Services as Usual Webinar
As demonstration sites move towards full implementation and consider sustainability, continuous quality improvement (CQI) becomes essential to achieving desired results, refining implementation strategies, and demonstrating program value to key stakeholders. This webinar will focus on CQI as a core component of family-centered care and will describe the stages of the CQI process and the types of infrastructure that can support that process. Presenters also walk through the newly developed QIC-CCCT demonstration site data dashboards, providing examples of how these dashboards can be used to support implementation, modify and improve program approaches, and sustain the family-centered services that sites have [...]