Chapin Hall

The Implementation Collaborative’s practice and implementation team co-developed a well-being dashboard to consistently measure and assess children and families’ well-being at the child, caregiver, and system levels. It allows child welfare staff to use this information in service, permanency planning and in making decisions about the use of limited resources.

It is one of the first dashboards in the nation to visually depict and comprehensively track the well-being progress of children, youth, and caregivers across numerous measures including:

• strengths and needs;
• services referred and received;
• visitation rates;
• school performance;
• distance between children’s home of origin, school, and service providers; and
• progress in functioning over time.

This national model provides a roadmap for developing well-being dashboards and putting into action the federal guidance on promoting the well-being of children in the child welfare system.

The Implementation Collaborative and child welfare agency began by identifying easily accessible functional assessment tools and other data sources related to child and caregiver well-being at the child and system levels. The visual depiction of the functional assessment tools and other metrics allows the agency to track child and caregiver progress, make data-informed decisions, and measure the impact of evidence-based interventions on child functioning. At the system level, agency leaders now have the capacity to understand which interventions are yielding improvements in child and family functioning and achievement of permanency.

This work at Chapin Hall is led by Policy Fellow Jennifer O’Brien. Jennifer’s work focuses on developing and using functional assessments, governance structures, data management systems, and business process mapping. She has expertise in collaborating across systems, in selecting evidence-based interventions, and in training agency staff and stakeholders. She is the former Director of Clinical Assessment Services at Northwestern University, under contract for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services Division of Clinical Services and Professional Development.

Contact O’Brien for more information about Well Being Dashboards.