Child At Risk Exercise (C.A.R.E.)
Protecting children today for a brighter tomorrow.
Introduction
In America, 1 in 10 children are referred to CPS every year. These 7.2 million children are reported to the CPS in 4 million separate referrals. Young children make up the bulk of the referrals.
Saul Glick, Harvard Scholar, Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Law and Medical Schools, and an award-winning police officer, spent three years developing a solution called C.A.R.E. (child at risk exercise). C.A.R.E. is a software tool that makes it easy for any adult to assess whether a child is at risk or in need of services and carry out the necessary actions.
Problem
Over the course of eighteen years of childhood, children have a 37% of being being investigated by child protective services (CPS). The chances are significantly higher for Black/African-American children, who have a likelihood of more than 50%.
Over the next eighteen years, there will be 145,087,200 children referred (approximately 16.8% are duplicates) to CPS. There is no standardized assessment to triage these children, and as a result, many of these children are ignored while others must wait shocking periods of time for help.
Currently, it takes 5 days for the CPS to deal with an initial referral about a child made by a frontline worker. It takes 33 days for an intervention to occur. C.A.R.E. aims to reduce these waiting periods to minutes and hours.
Opportunity
Child At Risk Exercise (C.A.R.E.) is a HIPAA compliant triage system, which quickly assesses the risks experienced by children using a traffic light method (red, yellow, green).
There are two (2) different styles of C.A.R.E. assessment, these are: C.A.R.E. (also known as C.A.R.E.1.) and C.A.R.E.2.; the latter assessment can only be triggered if the primary assessment indicates elevated or high risk of maltreatment experienced by a child.
C.A.R.E. or C.A.R.E.1., is a primary assessment which is designed to be used by a frontline responder (teacher, nurse, police officer, etc.).
C.A.R.E.2., is a secondary assessment designed to be used by CPS or other relevant agencies (hotline, charity, family justice center, etc.). C.A.R.E.2 is only to be used if C.A.R.E. indicates a child is RED or YELLOW.
C.A.R.E. results are shown on a chronologically displayed dashboard for easy access and to help identify escalating risk.
Please note: There are a variety of C.A.R.E. forms, designed to be relevant to various age groups: 0-4, 5-11, and 12-17. Another C.A.R.E. variation for pregnant women is being considered, due to the unique risk factors this group experience; however, it is being withheld to prevent complications with the Lethality Assessment (LA) which is widely used. The LA is not designed for pregnant women, however, there is often some overlap in its usage.