Empowering Practitioners and Practice Initiative (EPPI) – supporting the use of evidence in social work practice

The aims

The aims of the initiative were to:

• Improve outcomes for children and families using an outcomes-focused approach
• Increase the use of evidenced-informed decision-making in day-to-day social work practice
• Improve decision-making in relation to children entering and leaving the care system
• Reduced reliance on expert witnesses in court proceedings and reduced costs as social workers capacity increases
• Improve the confidence of social workers
• Strengthen the capacity of the workforce
• Strengthen partnership, collaboration and inter-agency working.

The challenge

EPPI had two core strands of work:  

1. Development of an online Therapeutic Intervention Toolkit to bring evidence to social workers on significant areas of their work.
2. Implementation of the Evidence-Informed Practitioner Programme (EIPP) for Tusla social workers to increase their skills in accessing evidence and applying it in their case work.

What we did

The Therapeutic Intervention Toolkit

The Toolkit is an online evidence-informed, outcomes-focused Toolkit for social workers working in child welfare, child protection and with children in care. It includes the best available evidence for critical practice areas along with practical tools and resources that practitioners can apply to their practice.  

The toolkit was designed by CES working in collaboration with a small team in Tusla.

The first step was to identify and understand the extent to which social workers use evidence in their practice. We scoped existing therapeutic interventions in use throughout the country by Tusla staff and examined the extent to which they have the capacity to and are using therapeutic intervention in their everyday practice. We scoped therapeutic interventions in use internationally and the level of staff’s familiarity and competence with the different interventions.

We then designed a ‘Therapeutic Intervention Toolkit’ which aimed to:

• improve outcomes for children and families through the adoption of an outcomes focused approach.  

• Increase the use of evidenced-based decision making in social work.  

• Promote the capacity of social workers to intervene therapeutically with children and families.  

• Improve decision-making in relation to children entering and leaving the care system.  

• Improve care planning for children in care, and their experience while in care.

• Improve the understanding of child development, attachment/parent child relationships, and the impact of mental illness, substance abuse and domestic violence on parenting capacity and family functioning.  

• Increase the use of evidenced-based interventions to address the issues above, and the capacity of staff to implement them.

The Evidence-Informed Practitioner Programme (EIPP)

EIPP was a professional development programme designed to develop the confidence and expertise of frontline practitioners, so they achieve better outcomes by applying evidence and knowledge in their day-to-day practice.

The development programme was designed and delivered by CES in partnership with and supported by Workforce Learning and Development (WLD) in Tusla.  

Specifically, its objectives were to: 

• Develop skills in sourcing, critically appraising and applying evidence to practice and service improvement
• Integrate evidence into reports and decision making
• Integrate evidence into supervision and practice/service development
• Facilitate knowledge translation and transfer across teams and between practitioners
• Build confidence of the workforce in their expertise and a learning and improvement culture.

The programme was delivered over 4 modules to social workers and team leaders in Tusla, across the four Tusla regions: Dublin Mid-Leinster, Dublin North East, West and the South.

The Programme employed an active learning approach: participants used live cases so that learning is applied immediately, completed a short literature review based on the theoretical underpinnings of the case and were allocated a mentor to support their development.  

It included training on sourcing, appraising and applying evidence, planning and delivering a literature review, Theory of Change, evidence informed intervention and applying learning to practice  

Two members of CES staff were seconded to Tusla to support the implementation of the EIPP and toolkit into social work practice.

The Impact

The Therapeutic Intervention Toolkit of nine modules became available to staff agency-wide in 2018.

An evaluation of the Toolkit found that the Toolkit is a supportive resource for busy practitioners in their work with children and families. A large majority of respondents, 80%, reported that the EPPI Toolkit was useful, very useful or extremely useful to them in their work.

138 social workers successfully completed the Evidence-Informed Practitioner Programme (EIPP) with support from 46 mentors from Tusla.

A Dublin-based social worker who works with children and foster carers, completed the programme where she explored maintaining and selecting foster placements for children.

She found the EPPI experience particularly helpful in one of the more challenging tasks social workers face, a court appearance:

"Courts were very interested in the case and queried what our foundation and reasoning of practice was when choosing placements, supports and working one-to-one with the child."

The programme gave her the confidence and the knowledge to explain to the court and other professionals the complexities of finding a placement for this particular child. More importantly, it also equipped her to deal with an area her professional training had not previously covered.

She says that through knowing the case and the best approaches, while engaged with foster carers, professionals and the child,

"My confidence rose as I used my new found knowledge that coincided with skills I already possessed as a social worker.”

In 2018 CES commissioned Crowe Ireland to conduct an independent evaluation focusing on the implementation of EPPI. The evaluation showed that an effective and successful project management approach was applied to developing EPPI, and the initiative is held in high regard by both the Toolkit users and the EIPP participants.  

“There is a perception of positive impact on social workers, in that social workers feel better equipped to make evidence-informed decisions and provide positive outcomes for children and families.”

“The evaluation depicts an approach which combines the application of robust project management techniques complimented by collaborative structures to ensure project progress. An ethos of consultation and review, within the collaborative culture that was created, characterises the work.”

‍(EPPI Evaluation, Crowe, 2019)

EPPI is an excellent example of designing, developing and implementing a project from beginning to end, leading to the embedding of the initiative in Tusla, the Child and Family Agency.

A short video about the EPPI initiative is here.

You can read the evaluation report here.