Quality assurance: Honouring the voices of children and families in child welfare

The Alberta Child and Family Services Council for Quality Assurance (CQA) is one quality assurance mechanism to promoting continuous improvements within Human Services. The Council is mandated under the Child, Youth and Family... [ view full abstract ]

The Alberta Child and Family Services Council for Quality Assurance (CQA) is one quality assurance mechanism to promoting continuous improvements within Human Services. The Council is mandated under the Child, Youth and Family Enhancement Act to make recommendations to improve the child intervention system (Section 105.73). The CQA recognized the need for people receiving child intervention services to have a stronger voice in the evaluation of programs and services that impact them.

As a result, the Child Intervention Service Quality Framework (SQF) was designed to strengthen the voices of clients and caregivers in the child intervention system. The Framework is based on the clients’ perspective and was created collaboratively with the ministry, the Alberta Centre for Child, Family and Community Research, and the CQA. The Framework provides a lens to promote and assess service quality and system improvement.

The primary focus of developing the SQF was engaging with children, families and communities to understand how they describe quality services delivered by the ministry (Child & Family Services). The SQF provides a quality assurance perspective that did not previously exist; evidence-based research representing the clients’ voice in the Alberta child intervention system. In combination with other quality assurance mechanisms, the clients’ perspective can now be incorporated as a lens to evaluate the quality of programs and services that are delivered in child intervention.

This presentation will describe how the SQF was developed (a highly participatory and iterative process based on foundational research); the working definition of ‘quality’ in the Child Intervention system that emerged; and, the actual framework with its seven elements and visual representation.