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Therapeutic foster care agencies provide temporary placements and a range of services to at-risk youth to help ensure their safety, permanency, and wellbeing. The practitioners that plan such care operate under heavy caseloads, limited resources, and high stakes. There is significant interest in supporting these practitioners with various technological interventions, but their work and the context around it is still poorly understood. This study aims to better understand the current assessment and treatment planning work in therapeutic foster care. We used the abstraction hierarchy modeling approach to outline the purposes, values, constraints, processes, and tools that define the workplace ecology encountered by care coordinators and clinicians from therapeutic foster care programs at Hillside, a collaborating human service organization. The resulting abstraction hierarchy was closely examined to identify areas for interventions and design implications.
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Critical Decision Method Interviews to Understand the Initial Treatment Planning Process in Foster Care
In foster care settings, the treatment plan captures goals and interventions for youth in care. The first version of this plan is typically due 30 days after the youth is enrolled in the foster care program, leading to a challenging month of assessing the case and developing the treatment plan. This study utilized Critical Decision Method interviews with care coordinators and clinicians to understand the decision-making involved in balancing assessment tasks, and the barriers to using assessment to inform treatment. The interviews were coded to identify major themes including information sources and constraints. These identified themes and general understanding of the problem space will drive future work developing interventions to improve the workflow process and drive better outcomes for youth in foster care.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1939579
- PAR ID:
- 10389324
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting
- Volume:
- 66
- Issue:
- 1
- ISSN:
- 2169-5067
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1060 to 1064
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1177/1071181322661439
