Intensive Family Preservation

HealthConnect America offers intensive family preservation services that are short-term, highly intensive, home-based interventions designed to protect, treat and support families with at least one child at imminent risk of being placed in custody. These services may also be used to reunify a family when a child has been in an out-of-home placement. This level of intervention is needed to enable the child to return home and successfully remain there.

Services
HealthConnect America offers a wide, comprehensive range of flexible and responsive interventions tailored to the individual child’s and family’s needs. Our team will accomplish this by performing a strength(s) based, behaviorally specific needs assessment.

Our therapists will ensure support is available to the family 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

HealthConnect America ensures that our services are responsive to cultural, racial, intellectual, economic, social, spiritual and gender differences among families. Additionally, we ensure that our services are delivered at times and places most convenient for the family primarily in the family home and community.

Those Family Preservation Services include, but are not limited to:

1. Facilitating inter-agency coordination and networking to assure the incorporation of a wide array of effective services to assist the client/family;
2. Coordinating educational and other appropriate services tailored to the needs of the client child(ren) and/or family such as parenting skills training; homemakers skills; family economics planning, mentoring services, tutoring services, or other similar services and training;
3. Providing intervention and advocacy activities on behalf of the client child(ren) and/or family with schools, social services agencies, community services resources, and other appropriate entities;
4. Providing therapeutic services that integrate behavioral counseling with adolescent and alcohol and drug interventions, as necessary. These alcohol and drug related services would include education, counseling and/or referral to outside agencies.

Approaches Used
Our agency and its caseworkers will utilize cognitive/behavioral approaches and other therapeutic services to teach families new skills so that the client/family can more effectively manage their lives. These services or interventions may include one-to-one interactions with individual family members or the entire family aimed at: 1.) strengthening a family’s cohesiveness; 2.) providing outlets for stress or recreation; 3.) use of unstructured time for positive activities; and 4.) role modeling.

Service Coordination
We will develop and distribute a service plan that has time-limited, measurable goals in partnership with the family and referral source. Frequent ongoing re-evaluation and communication of progress and needs will be regularly communicated to all parties involved with the child/family. Additionally, we will update the service plan as needed and submit a copy to the Family Support Services Team.

Intensity & Length of Service
Families receive an appropriate mix of face-to-face, child and family contacts, as determined and authorized by the agency. Intensive Family Preservation Services lasts a minimum of four (4) weeks, depending upon the severity of the case. Extensions may be granted based on need.

Staff Competency
Therapists assigned to provide intensive family preservation services have demonstrated abilities to:

1. integrate internally provided services with community resources to provide an effective plan of care for each client/family/case;  and,
2. to work in cooperation with all parties involved in the child's welfare as well as local educational systems on behalf of their clients.

All caseworkers of HealthConnect America assigned to providing Intensive Family Preservation Services will have as minimum staffing requirements: master’s level specialist or bachelor’s level specialist under the direct supervision of master’s level staff; and, training for staff prior to their working with families on delivering home-based crisis intervention services and cognitive/behavioral interventions.

Additionally, our caseworkers will have demonstrated educational competence and met guidelines regarding experience and educational requirements.Other forms of monitoring to ensure continued quality care include direct performance observations as well as the administration of written examinations and skills testing.

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