Sharing responsibility for children's safety and wellbeing

Caring for children and keeping them safe will be a shared responsibility. Government, non-government agencies, communities businesses and industry are working together to deliver the right services families need to raise children who are safe, well, healthy and supported.

Partners in Care

Foster and kinship carers are the backbone of the child protection system and have an integral role in providing safe and caring homes for children who are unable to live with their own families.

Between May and July 2017, we delivered a statewide engagement program in partnership with Queensland Foster and Kinship Care to engage with foster and kinship carers through 17 workshops across Queensland. The workshops explored topics identified by carers to share their experiences and contribute their ideas for strengthening support and cooperation between frontline services, foster and kinship care service providers and carers.

Partners in Care: Working better with foster and kinship carers (PDF, 428 KB) Partners in Care: Working better with foster and kinship carers (DOCX, 31 KB) has been developed in response to carers’ contributions at these workshops. It outlines our immediate actions to strengthen our working relationship with carers and identifies ways for ongoing engagement.

We’ll continue to develop and implement strategies to address the recommendations in the Partners in Care final summary report (PDF, 2.4 MB) Partners in Care final summary report (DOCX, 1.2 MB) and the longer-term issues raised by carers to improve the care system.

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Collaborative case management

Intensive Family Support services work with families who are experiencing multiple and complex problems, and need help to care for their children safely at home. These services take a collaborative and coordinated approach to responding to a family’s needs to ensure the family gets the right support at the right time, from a number of services.

An important part of working with families through Intensive Family Support services will be developing a single case plan for the whole family (recommendation 5.7). This plan, which is coordinated by a dedicated support worker, builds a shared understanding of a family’s story and reduces the need for a family to tell their story multiple times to different service providers.

Through having a single case plan and dedicated support workers, the likelihood of families staying engaged with support services and being committed to achieving the case plan goals is increased. It also aims to reduce the number of families being reported Child Safety by enabling families to get the support they need to get back on track.

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Central and regional governance

Our department is represented on each of the central and regional governance structures established to oversee the reform program and promote strong collaborative partnerships across the government and non-government sectors.

This includes:

We have also established a Stakeholder Advisory Group comprising academics and representatives from peak agencies and key non-government service partners, in response to Recommendation 6.2 of the Queensland Child Protection Commission of Inquiry’s final report.

The Stakeholder Advisory Group provides expert advice to us on the development, implementation and monitoring of child and family reform policy and programs.

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