High-Level Process Maps: Foster Care Services

When at risk of maltreatment in their family, children and youth are temporarily taken out of their homes and placed in foster care or group residential facilities. They are cared for in foster homes until reunited with their parents or adopted. Others age out of foster care.

Foster homes are nurturing places for children where they are away from unsafe situations and in a domestic environment. Prospective foster parents and their homes must demonstrate their capability to provide the child or youth’s care requirements, such as (a) being able to keep siblings together, (b) being able to accommodate youth, (c) allowing youthful parents to be with their children, and (d) being able to accomodate cultural, racial, ethnic, religious, sexual orientation and language needs. [1]

In 2022, Minnesota had a population of five million with 4,400 receiving foster care services. These represent 74% of children and youth taken out of their homes to ensure their safety. Notable causes of maltreatment or risk of its occurrence include caretaker drug abuse (34%), allegations of neglect (14%), physical abuse (10%), and child mental health needs9%. [1] The out-of-home experience is high among children of color. Compared to white children, children of color have a greater chance of receiving out-of-home care. Specifically, Native American children experiences 16 times and children of mixed races seven times. 

Since permanency, such as the adoption of the child or reunification, is the overall goal of the foster care system, it is easy to expect that a comprehensive performance measure of the average length of stay (ALS) is regularly reported. In 2007, the average wait for a child for adoption in Minnesota was three years or 30.5 months. [5] While this figure is unfavorable compared to the national average of one year and a half or 15.5 months, the Minnesota ALS dealt with foster care to adoption services and did not include other permanency outcomes. While adoption and foster care analysis and reporting system, or AFCARS data, are collected, the measure ALS is not reported publicly by states.[3]

Process Mapping Foster Care Licensing and Placement

The high-level process map is a powerful tool in an administrator’s toolbox. It covers all aspects of the delivery of foster care services and expresses it in easy-to-understand graphics. Benefits include the ease of communicating quality and service level goals to stakeholders and guiding process improvements in response to the voice of customers. It exhibits the basis for developing hiring specifications, training, and enumeration of skills inventory. It unifies and speeds up operational functions of goal setting, planning, execution, review, and analysis. Finally, it catalogs best practices found and learned. [4][5][6]

Removal of a child from their familial home can be traumatizing. Foster care gives a child a safer environment and care that reduces separation trauma. An assessment in the graphics above will show how the child benefits while in a foster home. Matching the child with a foster parent from the pool of licensed homes follows. Foster care is regularly reviewed until a permanent home is found and the child is discharged.

Mapping Foster Care services in more detail involves these licensing processes:

1.​ Recruiting Homes amenable to giving Foster Care

2.​ Qualifying Home to have capabilities that the child needs while in Foster Care

3.​ Training and licensing Foster Care homes

4.​ Licensed foster homes are finally placed in a database.

5.​ The child is placed in the Foster Care home with capabilities matching the requirements

Children or youth enter the Foster Care system through these processes:

1.​ The child enters the system through voluntary referrals and, in the minority of cases, mandates

2.​ The child goes through Foster Care intake

3.​ Assessment for Foster Care to ascertain the needs to result in good math with a foster home

By Mgmtlaboratory.com staff. 2024

References

1. Foster care: Temporary out-of-home care for children.  edocs.dhs.state.mn.us/lfservers/Public/DHS-4760-ENG.

2. Minnesota Adoption Facts. North American Council on Adoptable Children. www.nacac.org. 2007.

3. Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS). 2007 datamade available by the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect, Cornell University. 2007.

4. Process Mapping in Continuous Improvement of Public Service. www.mgmtlaboratory.com. June 2019.

5. Continuous Improvement and the Administrator. www.mgmtlaboratory.com.March 2019.

6. A Dynamic Model of Child Physical Development. www.mgmtlaboratory.com.August 2018.