THE Child Development Agency (CDA) has commenced the roll-out of a Child Case Management System (CCMS), designed to improve the services offered to the nation’s children, especially those in need of care and protection.

The CCMS is part of the technical upgrade at the CDA, an agency of the Ministry of Youth and Culture, to strengthen efforts of standardisation of services and to better manage the data pertaining to the care and protection of children in State care.

“This will revolutionise how we do work in the child protection sector. We will have the information at our fingertips,” according to Chief Executive Officer of the CDA Rosalee Gage-Grey.

“It has been going very well. We have done the training for our field officers and we have gone live in a couple of parishes, so by the end of this financial year, we would have gone live for the modules that are being implemented,” she added.

The web-based system, valued at approximately $58 million, will be rolled out in three phases.

Gage-Grey says the agency has completed the first phase, which deals with demographic information and the management of intake and general care planning.

“We will put the adoption phase on later, so we are rolling it out over a three-year period. We have completed the first year and we will move to phase two, then we will move to the reporting iterations later,” she noted, adding that the software will allow the CDA to have information for all children online.

Gage-Grey pointed out that the software is equipped to deal with placement and client information management; the management of medical and academic records and court processing and the monitoring of service delivery, such as court processing and caseload management. Additionally, it will deal with adoption, general care planning and the management of intake service and customer services; and will alert CDA officers and supervisors when to treat a child with a particular medical condition.

“It ensures that you document very systematically all the information on the child. So, I believe that this will help us a lot to be more efficient and to have more accurate information and be able to deliver services to the children in a timelier manner, which is critical,” she explained.

Gage-Grey told

JIS News that it will help the agency to move away from a process that is predominantly paper-based. “Some things will still have to be on paper, but the system allows us to scan and upload, so you have things stored electronically as well,” she added.

The CEO said it will trigger an alarm for an action plan for transition living before a child reaches the age of 18 years.

“So, it has that flexibility that you are able to do tracking and to account for all the children and all the services that are being delivered to them,” she noted

Gage-Grey said the agency is on a path to improving the services offered to children, despite the challenges.

“If we have a challenge it is the increasing and vicious levels of violence against our children. We have to address those as a country and how we treat with our children and I think that’s where we are going,” she said. The CCMS is one of several targeted interventions which the ministry commenced implementing last year to improve the services offered to the nation’s children.

Making her presentation in the 2015 Sectoral Debate in May 2015, Minister of Youth and Culture Lisa Hanna said the system will facilitate information sharing among the ministry’s agencies — the CDA, Office of the Children’s Registry (OCR) and Office of the Children’s Advocate (OCA).

She said it will provide each agency with real-time updates and access to information through a synchronised database, “which allows the tracking of a child’s records and development from entry to the system to exit”.

“This system will also allow the OCR to greatly improve internal operations (through the collection and storage of reports) and provide the public with faster ways of reporting and obtaining updates and information specific to children who are reported as abused and missing,” the minister said.