Final Report - RI Department of Children, Youth & Families

CHAPTER 6: PERFORMANCE MEASURES AND OUTCOMES
Key to the success of the system is the ability to effectively measure and evaluate system
performance and client outcomes for children, youth and families and to use these evaluations
to modify and further develop best practices. The system highly values the importance of
effective performance and outcome measurement at all levels.
The system of care’s culture supports evaluation and employs a comprehensive evaluation
strategy including the three components of context evaluation, implementation evaluation
and outcome evaluation (see Appendix K). This provides a sophisticated analysis of how
and why programs and services work, for whom they work, and under what circumstances
they work. The system of care evaluation component:
! Examines how the system functions within the economic, social, and political
environment of its community and setting (context evaluation);
! Supports the planning, set up, and implementation of the system as well as documents
the evolution of the system (implementation evaluation); and,
! Assesses the short and long-term results of the system (outcome evaluation).
These three measurements serve as the foundation and guide for the development of
performance and outcome recommendations for the system of care. The recommendations
themselves are tiered to focus on the need for a higher level system reform that must be
maintained within the authority of the Children’s Cabinet and to recognize the work necessary
at the level of state departments - individually and collectively.
On a direct agency level, there is a recognition that DCYF is accomplishing two distinct
goals. One is building system capacity. The second is developing a regionally based network
system of care which is specifically designed to address increasing demands and changes in
service needs for children and families at varying levels of intensity in a community context.
Moreover, the Children’s Cabinet continues its work with RI KIDS Count to develop child
indicators to assist the state in achieving the four outcomes adopted by the Cabinet and state
agencies. Toward this end, DCYF and other state agencies continue their work in building
performance measures and outcomes into service delivery both internally and with providers.
PERFORMANCE MEASURES AND OUTCOMES RECOMMENDATIONS
1. $ The Children’s Cabinet must develop, implement and fund an
evaluation/accountability plan to comprehensively assess the State’s effectiveness
in implementing the recommendations of this report over the five year phase-in
period. The development of this plan must include families (parents, kin, foster
and adoptive families).
It must be recognized that there is a significant cost associated with developing the
appropriate infrastructure to accommodate these information requirements, and the
State must establish this as a priority investment. Each Department must identify its
own financing needs for enhancing the data collection and analysis capability for its
own services and population, and the provider community must to do the same. This
System of Care Task Force Report (January 2003) 51