Supporting Families Nationwide: Healthy Families Staff Raises Quality of Care

Leveraging Expertise to Promote Critical Early Intervention Nationwide

Did you know that your generous giving supports children and families not only in Arizona but in other states as well? Together we are serving the children, families, and teens of Arizona. Because Healthy Families is a proven, national model that is utilized by other agencies across the country, some of our staff at CFR have had the opportunity to become peer reviewers. They work with the National Healthy Families America office to visit other non-profit agencies that are going through the accreditation process to provide home-visitation services in their communities. While there, they review their work and family files in order to gather evidence of adherence to the Best Practice Standards that every accredited program must adhere to. This allows our staff to serve another agency while working collaboratively to ensure the best services possible reach all families and children in need. This also provides CFR staff with the opportunity to learn from them on how we can be better as an organization and better serve the children and families we work with every day.

Through this opportunity, CFR’s staff gets hands-on experience. Our staff is able to see all the different challenges programs face and the creative intentional work that they’ve done to meet the needs of families in their communities. They review family files, and interview staff, managers, program directors, executive directors and families. After visiting the site and gathering evidence, they submit a report to the national office, which informs the national panel’s accreditation decisions. Agencies that are accredited are more likely to hold their services to a certain standard, therefore providing higher quality services to the families they serve. Each staff member that is a peer reviewer completes approximately two site visits a year. This helps our agency stay up to date on changes the national office is making to the best practice standards, and helps Child & Family Resources continually improve our services to better serve our community. This is so valuable to our staff because it helps us come up with great, new ideas about how to implement different programs and provide better services in our own community!

Thanks to you and your support, we are able to constantly better the services we provide to ensure the best care possible for our families.