The Child and Family Services Agency (CFSA) recognizes that any severe injury or fatality involving a child has a profound effect on the safety, accountability, and quality of care provided to vulnerable children. Such incidents do not only affect the individual child, but also have significant consequences for families and communities, impacting the entire network of individuals connected to the child’s welfare. CFSA acknowledges these far-reaching effects and emphasizes the importance of addressing them within its policies and procedures to ensure the well-being of all children under its care.  

To this end, CFSA maintains an enduring commitment to ongoing continuous quality improvement for the notification, documentation and review of significant risks to a child’s safety.  This policy provides guidance and instruction to staff and Agency partners on reporting and documenting critical incidents.   

CFSA has also implemented an evidence-based, safety science framework for the review of critical incidents to lessen the possibility of these incidents being mishandled, repeated, or going unnoticed. This shift in practice replaces two (2) previous policies: Critical Events (now critical incidents) and Child Fatality Reviews. Further, the Agency has broadened the definitions of critical incidents while concurrently narrowing the criteria for certain reviews. All critical incident reviews shall be grounded in a system-focused, safety-science-based process that bridges the experiences of the child, family, child welfare professionals and environmental factors that brought the critical incident to the Agency’s attention.  

Concurrent to this practice shift, CFSA will continue to comply with all federal and District data reporting and information-sharing requirements.