New Partnership to Update SDM® System in Australia

Evident Change recently kicked off a multi-year project with the New South Wales Department of Communities and Justice (DCJ) in Australia. A key part of this collaboration is a quality service review (QSR), which will help identify how the Structured Decision Making^® (SDM) assessment tools are used in practice by the department’s Child Protective Services. The QSR will lead to a series of tool, policy, and practice improvement activities designed to help DCJ staff receive the most value from the SDM^® system.

A partnership model will be used to develop and enhance SDM system expertise and ownership of the process within DCJ and the local community. A project team will comprise Evident Change staff; staff from several DCJ departments and units; and Indigenous people, practitioners, and community members. All members of the project team will be part of decision making at every step in the process.

Evident Change will facilitate the first step: to develop a plan to create and support the QSR. Evident Change staff will share policy analysis outlines, survey questions, data analysis plans, methodologies, and reporting solutions from their experience conducting similar research and discovery work with other jurisdictions. All parties will work in the planning stage to identify a communication strategy along with tasks, deliverables, roles, and responsibilities.

Much later in the process—once the assessment tools are updated and automation is nearly complete—training for trainers will begin. Evident Change will adapt and develop a curriculum, which they will deliver to local DCJ learning and development staff. These local staff will be responsible for ongoing training of their colleagues at DCJ.