Welcome to the WisconsinWell
Where professionals come to both be well and do well in their service to children and families.
and resources to sustain a
culture of safety in your work.
Come to the Well for Safety Culture Resources
Safety Culture in Child Welfare
Child welfare work is high-risk and interdependent within a network of public and private helping systems, such as education, mental health, healthcare, and law enforcement. It is work centered on safety, and child welfare involvements inevitably change the course of families’ lives – for better or worse. Children and families often come to the attention of child welfare during chaotic and vulnerable times, and discerning how to best help is hard and sometimes without clear solutions. Child welfare professionals choose this work with a passion to help children and families safely thrive.
How teams coordinate and experience their broader work culture has a relationship to outcomes for professionals as well as children and families. We need child welfare workspaces to be innovative, collaborative, resilient environments where teams monitor and respond to one another. A place where leaders listen, collaborate, learn, and commit resources to system improvement. In other words, we need to build and sustain a Safety Culture in child welfare.
A Safety Culture is a facet of a broader organizational culture where we:
- Acknowledge the high-risk nature of our work
- Cultivate psychological safety and teamwork in the interests of safe, reliable, effective operations
- Learn and innovate with systems-thinking principles
A Safety Culture in Child Welfare means:
We acknowledge
High Risk,
High Impact Service
Our work changes the course of lives. We have an unwavering commitment to quality and safety in the interest of preserving the safety and well-being of both families and our colleagues.
We cultivate
Blameless Candor and
Preconditions of Respect
True for both professionals and the families we serve, hidden problems and passive conflict are unhelpful at best and harmful at worst. We must be willing to both share and respect the sharing of mistakes, concerns and different points of view.
We learn to
Collaborate and Commit
Strong systems thinking, a balanced perspective on accountability, and continuous learning and improvement characterize us. No single one of us has all the answers. Innovation lies in the spaces within and between our perspectives.
Improving Professional and Family Outcomes through Safety Culture
The concept of a Safety Culture has existed for decades, and there has been a growing movement to center Safety Culture as foundational to learning, innovation and improved professional and family outcomes in child welfare work. Through a national collaborative and with a growing evidence base, leaders and agencies are learning from healthcare and other high-risk, high-consequence helping professions about how to build behaviors and actions consistent with a Safety Culture.
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Two paradigm shifts are important to creating and sustaining a Safety Culture.
In parallel process, both families served by child welfare and child welfare professionals benefit from these transitions:
Moving away from blame and towards accountability
Blame and accountability are different yet often conflated. Blame is backward-looking and asks what the proportionate sanction should be for an unwanted behavior. It’s retributive and requires people to “pay back” as a result of something they did. It’s not that blame is always unjust, but such approaches can be unhelpful, overused, and unlikely to promote learning. Accountability, on the other hand, is forward-thinking and restorative. People have often already suffered something at the point blame or accountability are being considered. Accountability engages us to share our experiences so both we and others can learn, and – in true forward-thinking fashion – leverage such wisdom towards prevention.
Moving away from quick fixes to apply systemic solutions
Many improvement initiatives fail because a “band-aid” was applied without root causes remedied. For families, this might look like asking a parent to complete a task (e.g., clean their home) without seeking to remedy the underlying factors – e.g., caregiver stress, community poverty, mental health, poor familial supports – that contributed to the problem. For child welfare professionals, it can look like adding more monitoring or documentation to an already complex and overburdened environment. While singular root causes rarely exist, we can keep our minds focused to understanding how multiple factors can be affecting the challenges we see, and systemic solutions are possible.
People are Valued in Safety Cultures
In Safety Cultures, people are highly valued assets for sharing, learning, innovation and improvement. They are not individuals to control or blame. In most situations, people want safe, stable, connected lives where they and their loved ones can thrive. This is true for child welfare professionals and the families they serve.
Videos on Safety Culture
Safety Culture in Short
These short videos share more about the rationale and context for a Safety Culture.
Implementing Safety Culture in Child Welfare
Safety Science as The Driver of Safety Culture
System vs Individual Accountability
The Role of Safety Culture
What is a Safety Culture?
Safety Culture in Depth
For previously recorded virtual webinars and conference workshops about Safety Culture in child welfare work, consider these videos: