HR and Child Welfare Data – Building Connections to Improve Practice

Combined human resources (HR) and child welfare data is essential to answer pertinent workforce questions. The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) has been intentional about bringing HR and child welfare professionals together to better understand and use the data they have available to them. In some cases, however, public child welfare agencies struggle to link their HR and child welfare data sets. Through the QIC-WD’s work with our intervention sites and Child Welfare Data Analytics Institutes, our team has worked directly with agencies grappling with the challenge of connecting these vitally important data sets to address a variety of workforce issues. This video highlights the obstacles they had to overcome and offers some concrete suggestions for agencies seeking to connect their HR and child welfare data.

Members of the QIC-WD team also wrote a QIC-Take which highlights the need to bring HR and child welfare leaders together to collaborate in a meaning away around the challenge of worker recruitment and retention. This QIC-Take also emphasizes the need to connect data systems to better support the workforce. Most recently, Children’s Bureau Division Director, Randi Walters, spoke to the importance of building the infrastructure necessary for child welfare leaders to use HR and child welfare data sets to understand what quality practice looks like in their agencies. In this short video, she points to examples from other professional fields and emphasizes the need to make those connections in child welfare. There is great value in investing in efforts to use the data already being collected by public child welfare agencies and their HR partners to better understand the dynamics and performance of their workforce.