The Cabinet for Health and Family Services (Cabinet/CHFS) is statutorily mandated to offer services to protect children from abuse, neglect, and dependency. Safety planning is utilized to address immediate safety threats and can be completed during investigations as well as during ongoing casework when additional safety threats are identified. Safety planning is voluntary, and the content of the plan should be negotiated and agreed upon with the family and all involved parties. Additionally, the plan should be specific, detailed, and practical in addressing identified safety threats. Safety plans can be reviewed and revised as needed but must be renegotiated with the family at least every fourteen (14) working days if the tasks on the safety plan continue to be necessary.
Safety refers to a current condition within a home or family and considers whether or not there is an immediate safety threat to a child. A safety threat refers to a specific family situation that is out of control, imminent, and likely to have severe effects on a child. A child is assessed to be safe when there is no safety threat within the family or home, or, if such a threat does exist, the family has sufficient protective capacities to protect the child and manage the threat.
A safety plan is a written agreement that the child protective services (CPS) caseworker develops with the family that clearly describes the safety services that will be used to manage threats to a child’s safety. Safety services assist families in engaging in actions or activities that may logically eliminate or mitigate threats to the child’s safety. These activities must be planned realistically to make them feasible and sustainable for the family over time. The safety plan will clearly outline these actions and activities, who is responsible for undertaking them, and under what conditions they will take place. It is designed to control threats to the child’s safety using the least intrusive means possible.
In all cases, the safety services outlined in the safety plan must have an immediate effect and be immediately available and accessible. They may be formal or informal: the services can be provided by professionals, such as childcare providers, parent/homemaker aides, and public health nurses, or by non-professionals such as neighbors or relatives. The important thing is that everyone who is part of the safety plan understands his or her role and is able and willing to carry out their responsibilities.
A safety plan differs from a case plan in that a safety plan is designed to control safety threats and have an immediate effect, while a case plan seeks to create change over time to reduce risk factors and increase the family’s capacity to protect the child. The safety plan must stay in effect as long as the threat to a child's safety exists and the family remains unable to provide for the child’s safety.