Assessing Risk, Safety Planning, and Supporting Families Through Crisis

Core Element Overview

The Team engages in ongoing identification and anticipation of risks to a youth’s and family’s safety, permanency, and wellbeing and develops evolving, shared understanding of what precipitates, drives, and helps to mitigate risk and crisis for youth and family. It involves engaging the family to help them establish a family-driven, individualized plan for how they can use their current skills and strengths to increase protective factors, build safety networks, and resolve potential dangers.

Safety networks include a youth’s and family’s protective relationships, as they define them, that are critical to the success of a safety plan, both in a crisis and on an ongoing basis. Input from all relevant supportive persons results in a coordinated comprehensive plan that is attuned to the families’ concerns and definition of safety, realistic for the youth/family to implement and addresses the assessed risks. Safety planning promotes effective collaboration and continuity in urgent situations across settings (e.g., school, home, group care). Safety plans offer a range of crisis supports to intervene when preventative measures cannot avert a crisis. Crisis support is provided and involves an urgent response that helps youth/family use their strengths and skills and network of relationships to diminish and/or manage acute risk.