Child Fatality Reviews: 4/1/09 - 12/15/09 Quality Assurance Report

The Michigan Department of Human Services (DHS) is responsible for administering the state’s child welfare program. The DHS mission includes a commitment to ensure that children and youths are safe; to sustain a higher quality of life; and to give children in DHS permanent and stable family lives. The DHS Children’s Services Administration is responsible for planning, directing and coordinating statewide child welfare programs, including social services provided directly by DHS via statewide local offices and services provided by private child-placing agencies.

A settlement agreement was signed July 3, 2008 and a final consent decree was entered on October 28, 2008. Since then, DHS has made significant strides to improve the quality of service to children and families in the child welfare system by reducing caseloads for its workers, moving more children to permanency, reducing the number of children in out-of-home care, launching a continuous quality improvement system, increasing oversight of contracted providers, and developing extensive data reporting capabilities.

The consent decree requires DHS to ensure that qualified and competent individuals conduct a fatality review independent of the county in which the fatality occurred for each child who died while in the foster care custody of DHS. The fatality review process is overseen by the Office of Family Advocate.

The Child Welfare Quality Assurance (QA) Unit is responsible for analyzing results and incorporating the findings and recommendations from the reviews into relevant QA activities. The QA Unit has been established as a division of the Child Welfare Improvement Bureau in the Children’s Services Administration to ensure the provision of service in accordance with DHS philosophy. The goal of the QA Unit is to ensure that children receive high quality services and achieve positive outcomes through improved service delivery, regular monitoring of case records and data trends, and improved implementation of policy.

This report is a summary of the child fatalities between 4/1/09 and 12/15/09 concerning 19 children who died while in the foster care custody of DHS.