Recurrence Rates by Child Protection Concern

The Ontario Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (OCANDS) is the first data system in Ontario to longitudinally track children and their families involved with the child welfare system. OCANDS extracts administrative data from participating child welfare agencies and standardizes these data to better understand the trajectories of children and their families across their involvement with the system. One of the tasks performed by OCANDS is to calculate “Service Performance Indicators” (SPIs) for participating child welfare agencies. In 2011, 24 SPIs were endorsed by the province as a metric that would represent the key dimensions of child welfare initially put forward by the National Outcomes Matrix (NOM) (Trocmé et al., 2009): safety, permanence and wellbeing, as well as agency management (Commission to Promote Sustainable Child Welfare, 2012). For additional contextual information about the SPIs, please see the OCANDS fact sheets (Fallon et al., 2016; Fallon, Filippelli, Black, King, & Ekins, 2016).

With resources from a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Connections grant, we have partnered with a group of agencies to use OCANDS to address their specific questions about the experiences of children and their families who are served by agencies in Ontario. The purpose of this information sheet is to present data collected from six child welfare agencies on recurrence. Recurrence refers to families coming back into contact with the child welfare system after their files were closed. This is viewed as a proxy for service effectiveness. This data was further disaggregated by child protection concern.