Outcomes in Treatment Foster Care

Early in 2003, the FFTA Outcomes Committee’s considered compiling a list of outcomes most commonly measured by TFC agencies and developing standardized definitions for consideration by FFTA members. The committee distributed a survey to all member agencies to assess the current status of outcome measurement within FFTA’s membership. The goal of this survey was to identify benchmarks related to treatment foster care.

In reviewing the results of the survey the Outcomes Committee realized that the definitions and interpretations of outcomes, and specific outcome objectives that member agencies use, are diverse and inconsistent. For example, some agencies include respite care in their measurement of the number of moves, while others do not. Needless to say, establishing national treatment foster care benchmarks with such variations in outcome measurements from agency to agency remains a challenge.

As such, the FFTA Outcomes Committee, with input from FFTA member agencies, developed definitions for common measurements within the following four categories: program, process, demographics and outcomes. The results of the outcomes survey, as well as the recommended outcomes definitions, can be found below. Recognizing that this is just a start in the process of defining common definitions in TFC, FFTA recommends that treatment foster care agencies consider utilizing and integrating these definitions into their data collection processes.

Recommended Outcomes Definitions

Results of FFTA Member Outcomes Survey

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