Our child welfare staff are drowning, and LD 1825 may just be the life raft they need.

Rep. Colleen Madigan has sponsored a bill seeking to establish limits to the number of hours worked by, and workloads of, child protective services caseworkers in Maine. Furthermore, it aims to increase the Office of Child and Family Service’s transparency with the Maine Child Welfare Ombudsman and the Joint Standing Committee on Health and Human Services.

If this bill were to pass, caseworkers would finally see some relief in the constant mandated overtime that they have been experiencing for years.

In 2021, the Department of Health and Human Services consulted with Casey Family Programs to seek guidance on system improvements following several child fatalities. Among the key findings, investigators discovered that child welfare caseworkers were consistently given workloads that they did not have the capacity to manage safely, or sufficiently. Caseworkers reported that, at times, their work conditions resulted in hurried decision-making done with limited knowledge and/or supervision.

All of these concerns can create a work environment with high turnover rates, where staff members are susceptible to burnout and vicarious traumatization.

In Francoise Mathieu’s Compassion Fatigue Workbook, she describes vicarious traumatization as a “severe reaction, where helping professionals who have been repeatedly exposed to traumatic material experience shifts in their fundamental beliefs and in some cases, damaged world views.” Some signs and symptoms of vicarious trauma she describes include: anger and irritability, avoidance of clients, impaired ability to make decisions, forgetfulness, compromised care of clients, and emotional exhaustion.

When one looks at the comment section of any of the recent articles regarding child welfare, they can see many comments from community members who feel they have seen or experienced these signs and symptoms in case workers here in Maine.

Luckily, Mathieu shares that there are several strategies that can combat vicarious trauma. These include having a better work/life balance, job satisfaction, rebalancing caseloads, reducing workloads, and limiting trauma inputs. Perhaps even luckier for Maine, many of these concepts are addressed in LD 1825.

It is likely that addressing these concerns will have important positive effects on child welfare staff. For example, changes like these may decrease turnover and incentivize new employees to apply. The state could see a decrease in financial burdens and an increase in productivity of child welfare staff.

Most importantly, if passed, LD 1825 has the potential to drastically improve outcomes for Maine’s most vulnerable children and families.

For years now, we have watched story after story in the media about the concerns in our child welfare system in Maine. Child welfare caseworkers are drowning in a sea of worst-case scenarios and criticisms from the community at large. Now is our chance to extend that life raft to them, by passing LD 1825.

Katrina Ladd is an expected 2022 graduate of the University of Maine at Orono’s Masters in Social Work program.

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