Welcome to the GVT Blog

Department of Social Services, the state agency responsible for addressing child abuse and neglect, has lost more the $100 million due to budget cuts over the past few years and can no longer meet basic federal requirements for child welfare.

What is "routing". Why is it important? In this post we cover the significance of routing and how it improves collaboration within your system.

Training your employees, service providers and partners takes a dedicated, multi-faceted approach to be really effective in 2010 and beyond.

For caseworkers, supervisors and foster parents in Michigan - the Child Welfare Training  Institute (CWTI) develops, implements, trains, evaluates, tracks, and monitors training for child welfare staff.  

As mentioned on their website - they offer core competency classes designed to prepare Michigan caseworkers and supervisors for careers in both the public and private sectors. Among their core programs is family preservation, children’s protective services, foster care, adoption, juvenile justice and PRIDE.

One of their primary goals is to offer specialized training statewide to child welfare staff. Training is often also available to law enforcement; tribal social workers; legal, medical, and mental health professionals; and many others who touch the lives of Michigan’s children and families.

Last year, GVT partnered with CWTI to develop a state-of-the-art learning management portal and help them to streamline training delivery, tracking and reporting.  This year CWTI is poised to roll out a new e-learning program and improve how they deliver training throughout the state.  The new program helps to deliver training more cost-effectively, via a secure Internet portal.

Training helps your teams be more effective, more productive and make less mistakes.  However, running a training program can be overwhelming.  With today's technology, trainers have more time to "drive" their programs - rather than "run" them.  They are able to spend more one-on-one time with students, focus more time on delivering good training material... and less on scheduling activities, orchestrating delivery and keeping track of and reporting results.

Case management + e-learning = FAMCare

We've just added a new video series to FAMCare called: "Under the Hood” – a live motion video series that walks visitors through FAMCare’s built-in form development wizards and financial management tools.

The term human service in its self is broad. Typically it involves the processes of helping out any child or adult who is part of the government system for a reason. That reason could be child welfare, juvenile justice, or an adult with a need. The list grows daily… of people needing assistance of some sort from various human services departments – and so the case for a quality information system is also growing. Our team at Global Vision Technologies knows and understands these needs and we meet them by providing human and social services teams with software that affords excellent advantages. These software programs help to elevate human and social services information management practices.

A new federal study was discussed today that documents an unprecedented and dramatic decrease in incidents of seroius child abuse... especially sexual abuse. From 1993 through 2006 the total number of children that suffered from physican, sexual and emotional abuse dropped from 743,000 to 553,000 - a 26% decrease.

We uploaded a FAMCare intake and referral management document today on the FAMCare website. You can download the document by visiting the "Take a Tour of FAMCare" page. The document details the features of the management tool and screen shots.

Hello partners, clients and friends...

According to data from the 2009 Monitoring the Future survey, the perceived risk of using ecstasy, inhalants, and LSD continues to decline among eighth-grade students.

Although 43 percent of eighth-grade pupils perceived a great risk of using ecstasy once or twice in 2004, only 26 percent perceived such a risk in 2009. The perceived risk of using inhalants declined from 46 percent in 2001 to 34 percent in 2009. The perception of a high risk from using LSD once or twice dropped significantly from 42 percent in 1993 to 21 percent in 2009.

According to Lloyd Johnston, principal researcher for the study, these declines in risk perception undercut "a major obstacle to experimentation."

Resource:

For further information, see the University of Maryland Center for Substance Abuse's CAESAR Fax at www.cesar.umd.edu/cesar/cesarfax/vol18/18-50.pdf

New grant opportunities have been posted and made available through the FAMCare website.  Grant funds for juvenile justice, child welfare, substance abuse and treatment can be found on the FAMCare Grant Resource webpage.