Gathering 2010 - Tuesday 11.00 - Perth, Australia
Due to technical issues there is no video available for this session. We apologise for any inconvenience.
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Presenters:
Andrew Turnell, Independent Social Worker and Child Protection Consultant, Perth, Western Australia
Katrina Etherington, Senior Practice Development Officer, Department for Child Protection, Armadale, Western Australia
Sonja Parker, Independent Social Worker and Child Protection Consultant, Perth, Western Australia
Abstract
The Signs of Safety was created in Western Australia in the 1990’s with the Department for Child Protection but it was only in 2008 that the Department formally adopted the approach and began to implement it across the organization. This presentation will describe the system-wide implementation journey as it has unfolded over the past 22 months.
Presentation
The Signs of Safety was created by Andrew and Steve Edwards working with over 150 Western Australian child protection workers during the 1990s. In the 2000’s as Andrew started to present the approach internationally, people regularly commented to him ‘I want to come to Western Australia and see how the approach really works’ to which Andrew would usually offer a cryptic reply like, ‘Well when you find it let me know’. The Western Australian statewide system, called the Department for Child Protection (DCP), serves almost 2 million people and is staffed by more than 1500 people. While the development of the Signs of Safety approach within DCP during the 1990’s was done with the knowledge of head office, there was never any commitment to system wide implementation. As a consequence of numerous restructures and a high level of staff turn-over by the early 2000’s very few of the practitioners involved in creating the Signs of Safety remained in the Department and thus the approach dropped well and truly beneath the radar in Western Australia.
By 2007 a major review of the Western Australian system was completed following a series of child deaths, which called for, among other things, a consistent approach to practice. As a result of the impetus of this review alongside the suggestions of a number of influential departmental practitioners who were using the approach (Katrina being one) the DCP executive and West Australian Government adopted the Signs of Safety as the assessment and practice framework for the entire state. The Signs of Safety had come back home and Andrew was terrified! While it was a wonderful affirmation to have the Western Australian Department adopt the approach, actually translating that aspiration into reality in a large bureaucracy spread out over a massive geographic area (probably the largest geographic jurisdiction in the world) was and continues to be daunting. We are 22 months into the implementation and our presentation will provide a picture of the journey so far.
Andrew will kick things off providing a brief overview, describe the implementation process, lessons learnt so far and compliment this with video from departmental Director General, Terry Murphy.
Katrina (DCP Senior Practice Development Officer) will offer her experience of how the implementation is landing in the field and will anchor her presentation around some case examples, one describing the use of Signs of Safety pre-birth and pre-hearing conferences, the other the mapping and safety building work conducted with a migrant family.
For a full scale implementation of the Signs of Safety to be effective in Western Australia the statutory implementation is only part of the story; other agencies from both the government and non-government sector must also be involved. Sonja will step outside of the DCP context (though she has been centrally involved in the DCP implementation) and describe her work as a consultant working with the reunification services of a non-government agency, Uniting Care West. Sonja’s presentation will offer her reflections on helping an agency focus on future safety, incorporate a number of case examples focused around safety planning and include a presentation of the Safety House tool she has created for involving children in safety planning.
The Department for Child Protection in West Australia has chosen November 12, 13 and 14, 2012 for its second Signs of Safety Gathering. All 23 districts from around the state will present as well as three international presentations. This Gathering will provide an end-to-end picture of a comprehensive system-wide Signs of Safety implementation. Participants from overseas and elsewhere in Australia are welcome though places will be limited.
