Moving from Pathology to Possibility: Integrating Strengths-based Interventions in Child Welfare Provision

Abstract

Child welfare providers are increasingly required to demonstrate that strengths-based, evidence-informed practices are central to their intervention methodology. This case study describes how a large child welfare agency instituted cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) as the core component of a strength-based practice model with the goal of developing a unifying methodology for treatment and intervention across diverse programmes that range from community-based counselling to wraparound to acute residential care. One factor that aided implementation was that many agency staff had previously been using a variety of strengths-based tools, such as therapeutic crisis intervention, skills-based training, solution-focused therapy, and relaxation techniques in their work with children and youth. Challenges included creating a common training curriculum about CBT, trauma-focused CBT, and solution-focused therapy for hundreds of diverse staff; implementing ongoing support in the form of supervision and training; managing staff members' other theoretical orientations and some resistance to change; and developing documentation to integrate CBT into clinical assessments, progress notes, and service plans. This paper also describes the evaluation plan to assess fidelity to the practice model, including trauma-focused CBT practice checklists, a revised utilisation review process to assess documentation of strengths-based interventions in case records, and the use of functional assessments to measure client outcomes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.