Illinois Department of Children
and Family Services Will Adopt All Recommendations in Audit of
Hotline
DCFS Releases Expert Audit of Child Abuse
and Neglect Hotline; DCFS Already Begun Work on Key Recommendations
to Increase Staffing and Improve Technology
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[November 22, 2019]
The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) will
adopt all recommendations from an audit of the agency’s Child Abuse
and Neglect Hotline, and has already started efforts to address key
recommendations, particularly increasing staffing and upgrading
technology.
DCFS released the findings from the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign’s Children and Family Research Center (CFRC) after
a five-month review of the hotline’s operations. Because the hotline
is critical to all DCFS operations, the department commissioned the
CRFC to conduct a comprehensive review focusing on call volume,
staffing levels and training, business processes and technologies
and data systems.
To view the complete report, click here.
“The DCFS hotline is often the first interaction families and
concerned individuals have with our department, and I am committed
to ensuring we are responding efficiently and accurately to every
report we receive,” said Marc Smith, Acting Director of DCFS. “This
roadmap will help us continue to make impactful improvements to
better serve the state’s most vulnerable children after years of
disinvestment and neglect. The department is already hard at work to
bring on additional hotline staff thanks to the Governor and
bipartisan members of the General Assembly, who approved increasing
our funding. Over the coming weeks, we will be adopting all
recommendations included in this report with urgency.”
The hotline (1-800-25-ABUSE) is available 24 hours a day, seven days
a week and serves as the “front door” of the Illinois child welfare
system and is the first way most children who are abused or
neglected are identified. In FY19, the hotline received 268,406
calls, a 20% increase from 222,719 in FY15; and during peak volume
times, the Hotline receives over 950 calls a day.
DCFS has already launched several initiatives to improve the
Hotline, including:
Increased Staffing. The allocation of more resources to DCFS in
Governor Pritzker’s FY20 budget – passed by bipartisan majorities in
the General Assembly – allowed the department to add 20 new
positions to the hotline. Those positions are in the hiring process
now. In order to reduce the number of messages taken by call floor
workers, DCFS also created new staffing patterns that will ensure
more efficient staffing. In addition, the department has been
meeting monthly with AFSCME to reduce the reliance on mandatory
overtime to safely staff the hotline. Because of this strengthened
partnership, the month of October saw a dramatic shift from
mandatory to volunteer overtime by hotline staff.
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Technology Improvements. DCFS is working with the Illinois
Department of Innovation & Technology to overhaul the hotline’s
website for online reporting. The new site will be easier to use and
is being rebuilt on a platform capable of handling a much higher
number of reports. DOIT also performed a comprehensive review of the
hotline to improve the tools available to call floor workers and we
are currently exploring additional features, such as online
chatting, texting and voice to text.
Rapid Results. In September, DCFS engaged Illinois Central
Management Services’ Office of Rapid Results team to create a rapid
results program for the hotline. The Rapid Results team uses proven
methods from the private sector to address operational efficiency
issues within departments around the state. The Rapid Results team
has been tasked with developing a plan to ensure that DCFS will
handle all calls in real time on the callers first attempt to reach
the Hotline. DCFS expects the review process to be completed this
year.
The CFRC review made the following 11 recommendations, which are
drawn from the audit:
1. Improve the online reporting system
by moving it to a new platform. Other states with online reporting
systems report that Call Floor Workers (CFW) are able to process
between four to nine online reports in an hour, which is much more
efficient than the current processing capacity in Illinois, which is
approximately 1.75. Each person we spoke with agreed that SharePoint
is not the appropriate platform to host the online reporting system,
and that the quickest solution to this problem would be to move it
to a web-based application that was developed “in-house” by the
Illinois Office of Information Technology Services (OITS).
2. Incorporate additional instructions
and features into the online reporting system to make it more “user
friendly.” Mandated reporters find the current online reporting
system difficult to use and hard to understand, which leads to
errors in the information provided. Instructions should be built
into the reporting system itself (through the use of pop-up
instructions or a chat box) rather than located in a user’s manual
that reporters may or may not read. The Department may benefit from
learning about the online reporting systems that have been
successfully implemented in other states. In addition, feedback from
mandated reporters who make frequent reports should be incorporated
into the design of the online reporting system.
3. Once the online reporting system has
been upgraded, a public awareness and education campaign should be
developed and presented to mandated reporter groups throughout the
state to increase its use. To date, there has been little in the way
of awareness or education campaigns about the online reporting
system, and reporters are finding it by accident or through word of
mouth.
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4. Eliminate the requirement for CFWs to document
the complete Statewide Automated Child Welfare Information System (SACWIS) and
The Child and Youth Centered Information System (CYCIS) case history in the
intake narrative for child abuse and neglect reports. The requirement for the
extensive documentation of SACWIS and CYCIS histories should be replaced with a
simpler (and less time consuming) requirement for them to document whether there
is a “positive or negative” SACWIS and CYCIS history in the intake narrative.
The exception to this recommendation would be for death investigations where all
SACWIS and CYCIS history would be documented in the narrative. The reasoning for
this recommendation is that once the report is transmitted to the Child
Protection Specialist for investigation, they are required to search and
document the same information in their report, which results in duplicative
work. State Central Registry (the hotline) (SCR) administrators and the CFWs
report that the SACWIS and CYCIS documentation process adds approximately 10
minutes to the time it takes a CFW to complete the intake narrative, which is
time that could be more efficiently spent serving other reporters.
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5. Eliminate the requirement for afterhours call
outs on normal response investigations. It is estimated that this process, which
was described in the results section, adds approximately seven minutes to the
amount of time required to complete an intake. CFWs would still be required to
call out all “action needed” and emergency response investigations, Related
Information, and Information Only intakes.
6. Continue to prioritize and implement SACWIS
improvements that will decrease manual processes during intake processing. Over
the past year, the SCR administrators and SACWIS developers have established a
collaborative process through which they identify and triage current SACWIS-related
issues that are impacting CFWs; this process has already yielded several useful
and more are expected to be completed in the near future.
7. Explore the feasibility and usefulness of adding
certain enhancements to the current telecom system (Finesse), such as adding a
code identifier to the existing 800 number that would allow certain groups of
mandated reporters (e.g., medical personnel or law enforcement) to be sorted
into a different queue (for example “press 1 if you are police, press 2 if you
are medical personnel”). The possibility of a second dedicated telephone number
for mandated reporters was explored in February 2018 and the results of the
analysis were included in a report. The recommendations at the time of the
analysis were to increase staffing and implement the online reporting system
rather than adding a dedicated line or code identifiers for law enforcement and
medical personnel. Once the additional staff have been added and trained and the
online reporting system is functioning more efficiently, it may be worthwhile to
revisit the idea of code identifiers.
8. Other states have implemented “talk to text”
technology that could potentially save time currently spent on typing the
details of the call into the intake narrative. Observations on the call floor
revealed that some CFWs spend several minutes transcribing handwritten notes
into SACWIS or cut and paste them from a Word document. The Department may wish
to explore the use of productivity-enhancing technology such as talk to text.
9. Other states have allowed certain groups of
workers to telecommute, which has resulted in higher worker satisfaction, better
worker retention and recruitment. The additional of 20 new CFWs brings the
current physical location of the Hotline to maximum capacity. The Department
should explore the feasibility of allowing some CFWs to telecommute from home. A
telecommuting option would require an initial investment in equipment (laptops
and soft phones), but the potential benefits would include increased staff
retention, the ability to recruit staff in parts of the state where recruitment
is not currently possible, reduce the number of staff time lost to
weather-related absences, strengthen the SCR disaster recovery plan, and reduce
the need for physical office space in the long-term.
10. Several CFW expressed concerns about the
difficult nature of their work and their inability to process particularly
difficult intakes with colleagues. The Department should explore resources to
support CFWs who are dealing with secondary trauma.
11. The results of any system reform efforts at the
Hotline should be monitored and examined by conducting a follow-up review in
18–24 months.
About the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS)
Founded in 1964, DCFS is responsible for protecting children from abuse or
neglect by responding to calls received on the Child Abuse Hotline,
1-800-25-ABUSE (1-800-252-2873). With the goal of keeping children safe, DCFS
strengthens and supports families with a wide range of services. When keeping a
child safe means removing them from the home, DCFS makes every effort to reunite
them with their family. When the best interest of the child makes this
impossible, DCFS is committed to pursuing adoption by loving families to provide
children with a safe and permanent home. DCFS is also responsible for licensing
and monitoring of all Illinois child welfare agencies.
The Children and Family Research Center (CFRC) at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign is an applied research center that engages with child and
family-serving agency partners to design and conduct applied research to improve
the lives of vulnerable children, families, and communities throughout Illinois
and the Midwest.
[Illinois Office of Communication and
Information] |