Dr. Crystal Collins-Camargo

Professor

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If we want to improve outcomes for children and families, we must support organizations as they seek to use data to inform practice on the client and organizational level.

Child welfare services are provided through the efforts of both the public systems mandated to serve families and private agencies which offer a range of services for those children and families. Children and families served by the child welfare system deserve effective services from the system mandated to help them. These agencies, however, are struggling to identify organizational and frontline practices that improve system, worker, and client outcomes. Dr. Collins-Camargo studies an array of strategies with which public and private child and family serving agencies could improve their work with these families to promote child safety, permanency, and well-being.

Dr. Collins-Camargo’s research focuses on organizational interventions primarily, such as clinical supervision, quality improvement and contracting strategies, and promoting use of data in organizational and practice decisions, which support frontline practice and ultimately improve organizational and client outcomes. She also studies inter-organizational relationships and collaboration to promote collective impact. She is currently leading Kentucky’s implementation of standardized screening for trauma and behavioral health needs of children coming into out- of-home care and functional assessment to drive case planning and selection of evidence-based treatment. This intervention is also designed to provide agency and system-level data to assess service array capacity and relationship between child characteristics, treatment and outcomes. Her research team is also studying how private child and family serving agencies can best promote the use of evidence to improve practice and outcomes for their clients.