Members of the Prevention Network Action Team recently attended a webinar sponsored by the Children and Family Futures Program (CCFutures) in the US. During the webinar, a CFFutures representative shared how Plans of Safe Care (POSCs) were being developed to support women who are using substances during pregnancy and promote mother/child togetherness at the time of delivery.
These POSCs are being instigated by court teams, who convene multi-agency collaborations that include child welfare, substance use treatment and OAT providers, medical/health care providers and children’s services, including home visitation and peer recovery supports. The peer supports play a key role in engaging families in voluntary services prenatally or prior to child welfare involvement, helping them navigate social services systems, as well as assisting with creating and monitoring the POSC, and providing important insights into barriers experienced by the families.
This POSC approach has the benefits of forging strong and deliberate partnerships across providers and is positively informing child welfare responses to women and infants where there has been prenatal substance exposure. This work to provide organized, trauma-informed and effective care prenatally is preventing removal of children at birth and family separation overall. At the court level, it is integrating a prevention mindset by asking what it would take to maintain the child in the home and ensure that reasonable and active efforts are made to support the woman’s and family’s health. At the community level, it involves the funding of community coordinators to oversee collaboration and implementation, as well as community education and training. It means that there is coordination from pre-to postnatal care, and that continuity of services is provided. And it is reducing NICU stays and the need for pharmacological interventions.
This is an excellent example of system level change to prevent FASD, as opposed to individualizing and medicalizing the response. The leaders cite similar barriers to what has been identified in many locations and in research about system-level barriers including limited staff and system capacity, concerns about confidentiality, stigma, as well as lack of knowledge about POSCs and their benefits – yet they are addressing these. One of the sites was quoted to say that most of the efforts did not require funding, with the implication that the accomplishments can be sustained in the local systems of care. Instead of requiring significant additional funding for the POSC work they “required commitment and investment by all involved parties to systems change and improved practices – collaboratively and individually – as providers and entities working with the target population.”
The description of this fine work has echoes in the conversations we at the Prevention Network Action Team have had over the years, and when developing the Mothering and Opioids: Addressing Stigma-Acting Collaboratively resource (see the policy values diagram from that resource below). Many of us have, and continue to, advocate for and deliver components of this coordinated system level response. The webinar covered the solid evaluation evidence for this type of response in detail, but the big story is that system level can be done that effectively and safely supports women, children and families. Where there’s a will, there’s a way.
