Quality Improvement Centers
on Child Protective Services and Adoption Services

BACKGROUND

In fiscal year 2001, under the Adoption Opportunities Program and the Child Abuse and Prevention and Treatment Program, the Children's Bureau awarded cooperative agreements to five organizations to implement regional Quality Improvement Centers (QICs) in the areas of adoption and child protective services (CPS). Four of the QICs (one focusing on adoption and three focusing on CPS) are moving forward.

PURPOSE

The purpose of the QICs is to promote knowledge development with the overarching goal of improving child welfare services. The QICs represent an experiment by the Children's Bureau to examine the feasibility and benefits of increasing regional involvement in designing and managing research and demonstration efforts. Each QIC will also disseminate their findings.

TASKS

The QICs are charged with planning and implementing research or demonstration grants on topics the QICs select with input from a regional advisory group and with federal approval. The QICs collected data and identified a topic during the first year. They will fund, monitor and evaluate research or demonstration projects during years 2 through 4 and disseminate findings during year 5. Required tasks include:

QIC Regional Advisory Group members include academics/researchers, state/local government representatives, and service providers from each QIC's region.

The QICs are charged with managing local grant projects that allow the QICs to evaluate multiple approaches and/or multi-site interventions on the selected focus topic to ensure that the number of subjects is large enough for a rigorous, methodologically sound implementation and evaluation plan. The evaluations will determine the effectiveness of the evidence-based models and its components or strategies, and findings will guide replication or testing in other settings.

FUNDING

QICs were not to exceed $175,000 during Phase I. QICs will not exceed $500,000 per year during Phase II (administrative, management and evaluation proposed budgets may not exceed $125,500 per year; the remaining $375,000 is to be allocated to local grantee sites). The grantee must provide at least 10 percent of the total approved administrative cost of the project.

QIC REGIONAL AREAS AND CONTACTS

Each QIC determined its regional boundaries. One QIC defined its region as 1 state; other QICs defined their regions as encompassing 3 to 10 states.