Assessing Implementation Team Readiness for a New Statewide Preservice Curriculum for Child Welfare Professionals

Background: Over the last few years, the state of Florida has made an extensive effort to plan, develop, and implement a new preservice training curricula for child protective investigators (CPI) and case managers (CM). While some core training elements have been shared among across Florida’s 20 judicial circuits over the past 15 years, training approaches have largely varied across the state. What makes this new preservice curriculum unique is that it was collaboratively developed and honed by a range of experienced child welfare professionals, trainers, and former frontline professionals, rather than contracting with an outside organization for a more generic or untailored curriculum. This qualitative research project examined implementation team members’ perceptions of readiness for implementing a new statewide preservice training curriculum for child welfare professionals.

Methods: This qualitative program evaluation study included focus groups with 18 child welfare professionals, impacted family members, and allied service partners who participated on the implementation team to develop and inform implementation of the new curricula for CPIs and CMs. Implementation team members were recruited across the state of Florida with assistance from the child welfare system in identifying potential emails of CPIs for the investigators to reach out to. Questions for this project asked about participants’ experiences, perceptions, and suggestions related to a new preservice training. A deductive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) using the organizational readiness for change framework was used to identify key patterns or themes that were prevalent throughout the data related to: (a) change commitment; (b) change efficacy; (c) change expectations, (d) change communication.

Results: Overall, participants were excited about the change in curriculum, felt that change was being communicated appropriately to various partners and collaborators, and expressed particular hopefulness about modernization of the training such as virtual reality and live simulation elements. Participants expressed a number of perceived barriers and facilitators to change efficacy, due to the structure of the child welfare system, the significant collaboration and structured decision-making that took place to internally redesign training, and concerns or questions about how to make necessary updates and improvements to training over time. Recommendations were made to support content or delivery of training, to further involve impacted family members, to communicate the training changes more widely across the state, and to evaluate the impact of the new training.

Conclusions/Implications: Given their significant practice experience and intensive participation in the implementation team, the majority of participants were able to provide a unique and critical lens of the strengths and challenges of implementing the new curriculum, existing gaps or recommendations for further enhancing the curriculum, as well as in-depth discussion of facilitators and barriers to implementing a new training in a privatized child welfare system and diverse state context. Findings highlight the importance of having a structured decision-making framework for planning and implementing large-scale systemic change efforts, as well as involving a range of frontline and lived expertise to consider the intended impact and benefit of planned change efforts.