This resource provides descriptions and general specifications of more than 40 Case Management Summary Reports, Case Listings, and Quality Assurance Reports, with special attention to their role in a court's continuous quality improvement efforts for child welfare cases.
This publication provides brief descriptions of various reports and their importance in a court’s continuous quality improvement (CQI) efforts in child welfare cases; general specifications regarding how the reports can be constructed, including templates with insights on how to display data in tabular and/or chart format; specifications of data fields that serve as the foundation for the reports, with a description of key calculations and formulas, and case selection/sorting parameters; recommendations for the frequency with which the reports should be generated, and who should be included in the distribution lists; and potential uses of data reflected in the reports and utilization of other companion Case Listings, Quality Assurance Reports, and Case Summaries that allow the court to delve into the characteristics of special cases. Reports featured in this publication are as follows: child welfare caseload; child welfare caseload demographics; case processing time requirements; case adjudicated during period; cases pending adjudication; cases completing initial disposition during period; cases pending initial disposition; temporary custody cases with completed initial reviews; temporary custody cases without completed initial reviews; temporary custody cases with completed permanency determinations; temporary custody cases with pending permanency determinations; child welfare hearing results; quality assurance reports; and family profiles – reports summarizing key information of a family’s court case. Each report type is presented in its own section with descriptive information. The final section includes some concluding remarks on the judicial child welfare dashboard, noting some state judicial systems and local jurisdictions that have developed their own child welfare caseload dashboards as well as public-facing versions that are published on general access websites. Appendix A provides an overview of how child welfare cases could be tracked in juvenile and family courts; and Appendix B includes a suggested list of data elements to track, noting category types, data elements, comments, and sample values.