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There has been, and continues to be, a critical need for child welfare agencies, both public and private, to be more accountable to the children and families they serve, as well as to their various funding sources and their staff. Historically, the primary way in which accountability has been measured within human service organizations was through externally driven review processes usually focused on compliance with minimum requirements. But, in recent years, with the advent of accreditation and the reality of shrinking resources, there is now a clear demand for outcome performance as the predominant measure of accountability. Over the years, accountability for service provision and outcome performance has evolved in Illinois. Since 1997, child welfare in Illinois has changed from a public system that basically provided complete oversight and accountability for the work of private service providers, to a public system that purchases child welfare services from private providers who are monitored and held responsible through contractual provisions for their own work. Privatization and the use of performance contracting calls for the creative use of comprehensive continuous quality improvement (CQI) methods to address outcome performance by the state as a whole. A major factor in Illinois' ability to successfully meet and sustain federally mandated program improvements, comprehensively monitor and track outcome performance on an ongoing basis, and ultimately improve outcome performance in the federal Child and Family Services Reviews (CFSR) will be the ability of the system as whole to ensure that the concepts involved in Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) efforts are understood and applied consistently and simultaneously by both the Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) and its approximately 87 contracted private sector partners (POS agencies). In a privatized child welfare environment such as Illinois', stakeholders must not only have strong systems for ensuring quality results within their individual organizations, but there must also be a mechanism in place to integrate the quality improvement efforts of all stakeholders to ensure better results/outcomes for the community being served. In an effort to develop a statewide integrated POS agency and DCFS CQI system, the Foster Care Utilization Review Program (FCURP) launched a new initiative in May 2007, the Integrated Quality Improvement Framework. Key components of this framework include POS Regional Quality Councils (RQCs) and DCFS and POS Regional PIP Workgroups. This initiative was launched via a series of CQI Conferences that were conducted in each region of the state.
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