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Director's Message
Feb. 22, 2008
To: All DHS employees From: Bruce Goldberg, M.D., Director
“Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any one thing.” ~Abraham Lincoln (In honor of last Monday’s Presidents Day.)
This past week many of us saw or read the story about a newborn girl who was rescued from a toilet on Valentine’s Day and placed in our care. Baby Valentine, as many have taken to calling her, seems to have recovered and is doing well with a foster family taking care of her.
This incident highlights -- in a way that no amount of statistics can do -- the kinds of situations that bring children into our care and the importance of the work our Child Welfare staff perform every day.
Thousands of children rely on our help. And we need to ensure we’re doing the best job possible of providing that help.
We’ve taken many steps in the past year to improve our ability to protect children. Among them, we’ve rolled out the new Child Safety Model, added staff to help address the increasingly complex needs of the children in our care, implemented the final steps of the Children’s Mental Health System Change Initiative, provided additional resources to help parents get needed substance abuse treatment, and are working closely with the Governor’s Office and other agencies on the Statewide Children’s Wraparound Project.
All of these actions will make a positive difference for children. However, we can do more and we must do more to continue to improve our capacity to care for children.
That’s why DHS just engaged in a Child Welfare staffing study, which has resulted in a list of areas ripe for improvement. We already have begun to address some of these areas, and we will continue until all are successfully dealt with. It is imperative that we do so, both for our clients and for our hard-working and highly committed Child Welfare staff.
For example, the study found that we don’t apply consistent approaches throughout the state to helping children in our care, nor do we have an easy way to share best practices among districts. Some areas have more local resources than others, such as partner groups who can help recruit more people to be foster families. Our staffing standards are outdated, and staff-to-case ratios vary among districts. We clearly need additional staff and many of our Child Welfare workers lack equipment, such as laptops and Blackberries, that would help them be productive while traveling or waiting for court hearings. We also lack a shared database to ensure seamless transitions for children who move between districts and programs. These are just some of the weaknesses in our system, and we are taking action to address them.
Another key effort under way is the work being conducted by the Child Safety Workgroup, which Governor Kulongoski and I convened last December. The workgroup is charged with reporting back in May on recommendations for how Oregon can 1) improve family stability to reduce the number of victims of child abuse and neglect, 2) reduce the number of children coming into state care, and 3) ensure that children who do enter the foster care system thrive while in state care.
The combined information from the Child Welfare study and the Child Safety Workgroup will help us continue to improve our services to Oregon’s children, and that’s great. But as we move forward we need to remember that DHS is just one part of a larger whole. We and our state’s children rely on a number of dedicated and diligent community partners to help ensure that children thrive.
Thank you to each and every one of you -- those of us within DHS Child Welfare, our community partners, our foster parents -- who work to keep kids safe.
Ultimately, however, it is all of society who must determine the priority we place on our children’s safety and well-being. These are Oregon’s children, and we as a society need to collectively determine what kind of future we want for our children.
We will do our part. We will continue to improve our ability to effectively and efficiently keep children safe and prevent them from being abused and neglected. But it will take all of us -- our staff, our partners, our legislators and every resident of this state working together -- to create the kind of safe and successful future Baby Valentine and every child in Oregon deserves.
To provide feedback email: DHS.Directorsoffice@state.or.us
This message is intended for all department employees. Please read it electronically, if possible. Managers and supervisors are asked to share the message each week with employees who do not have email access. |
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