Substance Abuse Specialists in Child Welfare Agencies and Dependency Courts - Considerations for Program Designers and Evaluators

摘要

This paper focuses on one particular model of collaboration, the placing of substance abuse specialists in either child welfare offices or dependency courts. The purpose of co-locating substance abuse specialists is to ensure that parents are assessed as quickly as possible, to improve parent engagement and retention in treatment, to streamline entry into treatment, and to provide consultation to child welfare and dependency court workers. In addition to briefly describing substance abuse specialist programs and their various components, this paper includes findings from eight qualitative interviews of programs that place substance abuse specialists in child welfare offices or dependency courts. The interviews highlight ways in which early decisions about the programs collaborative structure influence other design decisions. Understanding how design decisions are related to one another can help jurisdictions to systematically create substance abuse specialist programs that best meet their specific needs and use resources most efficiently. This information is intended to provide those interested in creating a substance abuse specialist program with valuable data on programmatic and collaborative structures, lessons learned about program design, problems or challenges faced by these programs, and how the issues were resolved.