Kids Central Case Management Responsibilities

Kids Central Inc. is a nonprofit social services organization in Florida. Its mission is to deliver coordination of care programs to kids who are in child protective services. Case managers who work for Kids Central Inc. play an integral role in the lives of children who are involved in some aspect of child protective services, such as foster care, kinship and adoption programs. Case managers help kids feel supported and encouraged during transitional periods in their lives.

Case Management Objectives

• Case managers at Kid Central serve as support system facilitators and advocates for children and families involved in child protective services. With the high volume of incidents of child abuse and neglect in Florida, Kids Central builds programs that aim to support parents and children so that they can be reunited. In abusive situations this is not be an option, so case managers at Kids Central work with relatives for kinship placements or foster parents to keep children safe in a home environment.

Treatment Planning

• Case managers are involved in treatment planning with youth and families in child protective services. Treatment planning involves identifying what types of services the youth and family can benefit from and mapping out goals for these services. For instance, a child who is recently placed with foster parents may have a difficult time adapting to the new environment. Mental health services with a child therapist may be a service that the child can benefit from to help him during this time in his life. The case manager will coordinate services with mental health therapists in the community and facilitate the referral so that the youth may begin receiving professional help.

Advocacy and Resources

• The child protective service industry is prone to challenges, so foster parents, kinship providers and adoptive parents may call upon their assigned case manager at Kids Central to help them work through barriers that they encounter or questions that they have. Since each family and youth is assigned a case manager to work with, that case manager will already have some background on the situation at hand and will be able to help them resolve the issue. The case manager will work as an advocate if the family or youth needs help accessing mental or medical services in the community, if they need a referral for a school program, if they do not understand how to start the adoption process or if they need information on how to re-license their foster home. Case managers are responsible for providing families and children in the system with the resources they need to maintain stability and support.

Service Delivery

• Services are community-based, so case managers go out into the homes, schools and other public areas to work with families and/or youth. Case managers can also be expected to attend court hearings for legal parent-child reunification decisions, and they may be asked to meet with children, families and their medical or mental health teams to participate in group treatment planning.

Record Keeping

• Case managers are required to maintain client records on the cases they oversee. Records are considered confidential as they often contain private health care information, such as a youth's diagnosis of an emotional disorder. Accordingly, case management responsibilities expand to proper record keeping duties, such as ensuring that the records are current and only disclosed when it is legally appropriate to do so. Case managers at Kids Central adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), which is a federal confidentiality law instituted by Congress to protect health care information from being misused and improperly disclosed.