Child Welfare Worker Caseload: What's Just Right?

This study was designed to establish a caseload standard for child welfare workers. Understanding reasonable workload expectations for child welfare workers is a cornerstone of quality service provision and the recruitment and retention of qualified workers. Because of the analytic complexity of thi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social work (New York) 2009-10, Vol.54 (4), p.361-368
Main Authors: Yamatani, Hide, Engel, Rafael, Spjeldnes, Solveig
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accreditation
Advertising expenditures
Arithmetic mean
Attrition
Burnout
Burnout, Professional
Case management (Social services)
Caseloads
Caseworker Approach
Caseworkers
Child
Child Welfare
Child Welfare Services
Child welfare workers
child welfare workload
Child, Preschool
Children
Costs
Focus Groups
Foster care
Humans
Job openings
Job Shadowing
Management
Methods
Pennsylvania
Performance standards
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Practice
Quantitative methods
Recruitment
Research methodology
Service provision
Social Work
Social Workers
staff retention
Work Environment
Work hours
worker burnout
Workers
Working Hours
Workload
Workloads
Young people
Youth and Families caseload
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Summary:This study was designed to establish a caseload standard for child welfare workers. Understanding reasonable workload expectations for child welfare workers is a cornerstone of quality service provision and the recruitment and retention of qualified workers. Because of the analytic complexity of this question, qualitative and quantitative methods were used. The mixed methods included focus group sessions involving 60 Children, Youth and Families (CYF) workers, analysis of more than 16,000 CYF cases maintained by the CYF information management system, and job shadowing of 34 randomly selected CYF workers for an aggregate of 5,600 work hours. The study was conducted on the CYF located in Pittsburgh. Results indicated that, on average, some CYF workers had been assigned twice as many cases as the 16 to 17 per month suggested as reasonable by the present findings.
ISSN:0037-8046
1545-6846
DOI:10.1093/sw/54.4.361