Eckerd

Social worker Ruby Guillen’s shift at the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), the largest child welfare agency in the U.S., starts at 4 p.m. and ends at 2:30 a.m.—except when serious incidents occur and keep her on the job even longer.

Los Angeles County struggles to strike the right balance between human judgment and increasingly sophisticated predictive tools when determining the risk that a child will be abused.   On weekdays, calls to Los Angeles County’s child abuse hotline reach their peak between 2 p.m.

Yesterday The Imprint of Social Change profiled a new precautionary child welfare tool being used in Florida called Rapid Safety Feedback (RSF). You can read all about it here, but Youth Services Insider wanted to hit home why we believe it’s a huge deal for the business of child welfare.

Many times, a spate of child deaths will cause systems to overreact, leading to sharp upticks in child removals. In some cases, a myopic focus on those cases has lead to costly, wholesale child welfare reforms in which policies that dictate the decision-making in hundreds or thousands of cases are changed based on a small sample of horrific cases.