Evaluation of Resources to Support the Identification and Care of Children with Prenatal Substance or Alcohol Exposure in the Child Welfare System

The Children’s Bureau (CB) in the Administration on Children, Youth and Families (ACYF), Administration for Children and Families (ACF), U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is partnering with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to support child welfare agency staff in the identification and support of children in the child welfare system living with prenatal substance exposure (PSE), including prenatal alcohol exposure (PAE). To this end, we are developing a toolkit of resources that child welfare agencies can use to: • Increase awareness, understanding, and knowledge of PAE/PSE; and • Plan and implement internal and cross-system processes, in partnership with key stakeholders, that help identify, assess/evaluate/screen, share information about, and provide care and support to children with prenatal exposure and their families. The CB is undertaking a multi-stage evaluation designed to understand the extent to which the toolkit is achieving these intended outcomes. The following activities will contribute to the evaluation: (1) usability testing and (2) a formative evaluation. The second stage of the evaluation builds on the first stage. Usability testing of the toolkit was conducted November 2022-March 2023 (under Formative Generic for Program Support OMB #0970-0531, exp 9/30/25) to gather feedback from child welfare staff in the field to determine the usability of toolkit modules before the toolkit is finalized. Based upon usability testing findings, an equity review was conducted and the toolkit has undergone modifications based upon the findings. Data collection for the formative evaluation was approved in April 2023 (OMB# 0970-0608, exp 4/30/26).

The latest form for Evaluation of Resources to Support the Identification and Care of Children with Prenatal Substance or Alcohol Exposure in the Child Welfare System expires 2026-11-30 and can be found here.

Instrument 1: Survey of reactions to the toolkit

Federal Enterprise Architecture: Community and Social Services - Social Services