A Cost Analysis of Trauma and Well-being Screening for Children in Custody

ABSTRACT According to SAMHSA (2014), 1 of the 10 domains of a trauma-informed approach to child welfare relates to universal screening; however, costs of installation and implementation models are often unclear. This paper provides administrators of human service organizations with a fiscal example of the estimated cost of implementing screening with children in the custody of a public child welfare system. Findings show that the cost of installation and start-up are estimated at 208 USD per child while ongoing implementation/sustainability costs are 130 USD per child when implementation is universal to all children in custody. Discussion includes implications for practice and future research. Practice Points There are challenges and successful practices associated with developing trauma-informed child welfare systems (Akin et al., 2018), and public child welfare administrators benefit when they can understand potential costs of implementing new trauma-informed practices, such as screening. Understanding cost analysis is important for leaders across multiple levels of non-profit and human service organizations in order to make informed choices about policies and practices that balance input, output, and outcomes. Human service leadership teams should consider utilizing justice-enhanced cost findings to prioritize and select policies and practices that incorporate fiscal data with intervention data to address individual and structural challenges that maintain disadvantage, inequity, and marginalization. Investing in a trauma/mental health screening tool with their child welfare population is a minimal cost…substantially less than the cost of out-of-home care.