Resources

Best Practice Handbooks

Helping in Child Protective Services:
A Competency-Based Casework Handbook

American Humane has partnered with Oxford University Press to publish the second edition of this handbook of essential information on CPS best practice. This latest edition offers the most up-to-date research and information to help professionals provide the highest quality and most innovative services to children and families.

Contents include:

• The CPS Experience: Working with a Family from Beginning to End
• The History of Child Protective Services
• The Casework Process
• Key Partners in Protecting Children and Supporting Families
  
• Interviewing Children and Families
• Intake and Investigation: Initial Stages of the CPS Process
• Child Development
• The Medical Evaluation of Abuse and Neglect
• Intervention with Families*
• The Legal Framework for Child Protective Services
• Accountability in Child Protective Services
• Plus an informative glossary and index

The revised edition is now available! Order online and receive a 25% discount! Visit www.oup.com/us/socialwork for more information. *Download a sample chapter: Intervention with Families.

Colorado Child Welfare Handbook

(1998, revised 2001)

The Colorado Department of Human Services, with the assistance of American Humane, developed this Child Welfare Practice Handbook in 1998. Revised again in 2004, this publication provides guidance for child welfare professionals (e.g., casework practitioners, supervisors, case aides, foster parents) and their colleagues (e.g., mental health professionals, school personnel, juvenile justice system staff) on how to work with families and with each other to achieve positive outcomes for children and families within the child welfare system.

The purpose of the Handbook is to raise and support standards of practice in Child Welfare by exploring how quality child welfare practice implements policy. It brings together current views and experience of many child welfare professionals and applies these to the decisions and activities of child welfare work in Colorado. The Handbook can be accessed on the Colorado Department of Human Services, Division of Child Welfare website. Click here to access the CDHS website.