Safety to Give and Receive Help
Creating Safety Culture
The Center for the Helping Professions (CHP) partners across sectors to improve systems and outcomes through evidence-based approaches and pragmatic innovation. We recognize effective change requires both proven methodologies and an understanding of each organization’s unique context and challenges.
Our goal is safe, effective, and reliable helping systems.
Lasting change comes through collaborative partnerships that candidly recognize and address systemic challenges.
What We Do:
Safety, Improvement and Implementation Science
With a passion for human-centered design and the steadiness of small iterative tests of change, we approach our work with a set of customizable tools and tactics tailored to your organization’s unique needs and context.
An Evidence-Based Approach
Organizations responsible for supporting community well-being must be safe places to give and receive help. Safe organizational cultures are characterized by their habits and how they solve problems. First, they employ problem-solving methods that are non-punitive, non-reactive, and focus on true system-level understanding when things go wrong. Second, they cultivate team-based habits that promote safe, effective, and reliable work.
Our work often starts with helping organizations establish a person-centered, systems-theoretical critical incident review. While critical incidents—such as fatalities, near fatalities, use of deadly force, or physical restraints—are rare, their impact can be profound. When handled through blame and shame rather than systemic solutions, these events can create fear, and lasting damage across an organization.
Critical incident reviews serve as an ideal starting point for building these approaches. These reviews deserve careful attention, as they yield the greatest impact on future outcomes when viewed through a systems lens that reveals root causes. However, when organizations handle these reviews reactively or punitively, they not only limit learning opportunities but can also negatively impact organizational culture.
The high-profile, high-stakes nature of critical incident reviews typically ensures direct access to leadership and quality improvement initiatives. This leadership investment is crucial for organizational change, as the review process can serve as a vehicle for building a safer organizational culture. When organizations transform their response to these high-profile incidents, they can fundamentally change how their professionals work together in teams.
Who We Serve
Our work spans the helping professions, beneficial for teams in public child welfare, law enforcement, corrections, emergency medical services, public health, education, fire response, and healthcare.
Our Deliverables
Structured Methodology:
- Independent critical incident review
- Safety assessment
- Process mapping and design
- Policy crosswalks
- Organizational workforce assessment
- Workforce and safety data analytics and visualization
- Critical incident prevention initiatives
- Research and evaluation
Cohort-Based Learning:
- Practice communities
- Learning and quality improvement collaboratives
- Cross-agency data sharing and insights
Training and Technical Assistance:
- Leadership engagement and skill-building
- Crisis communications
- Critical Incident Review practices and procedures
- Safe Systems Improvement Tool training and certification
- Quality improvement specialist training and certification
- TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture workforce administration and analysis
- Teaming and care coordination: applied practice trainings
Secure Data Solutions:
- Critical Incident Review databases
- Tailored data solutions
- Data visualization/dashboards
If you have a need that isn’t reflected here, reach out. We’re happy to talk through how we can help.
Our Culture of Safety Work
We are proud to be the lead and founding technical support for this member-led quality improvement collaborative. The National Partnership for Child Safety is a peer-to-peer community that learns and takes action from shared de-identified critical incident reviews with the Safe Systems Improvement Tool (SSIT) and organizational assessments with the TeamFirst Assessment of Safety Culture (TASC). To the best of our knowledge, they represent the largest collaborative of public child welfare agencies in the country.
The National Center for Fatality Review and Prevention provides opportunities for local, state, and tribal teams to cultivate and share expertise in making communities safer and systems stronger. The National Center provides expert guidance, training and resources to turn data analysis insights into impact. In our work with the National Center, we provide technical assistance to identify promising approaches and guidance on optimizing communication and collaboration across agency review teams.
We created the Wisconsin Well—a robust resource hub to support the well-being of social work professionals—for the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families. The Wisconsin Well website provides educational information, including an extensive video library, how-to tools, and resources to facilitate teaming and systems-thinking strategies. In building a culture of safety, we can improve psychological safety and support safe, effective, and reliable outcomes for children, youth, and families involved in child welfare.
At the Center for the Helping Professions, our work is about driving quality improvement that truly transforms the lives of those who work in the helping professions. In our partnership with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, we are working to enhance teaming, foster and sustain a proactive safety culture, and conduct in-depth analyses of children’s experiences in care to improve outcomes for all.
In collaboration with the New Jersey Department of Children and Families, we developed the Safe Systems Improvement Tool (SSIT) for Residential Congregate Care to facilitate learning and proactive response after serious incidents involving youth in congregate care environments. These incidents—which can include physical holds, runaway situations, and suicide attempts—demand thoughtful and effective strategies. With the SSIT, we can create safer, more supportive settings for vulnerable youth, ensuring that every event is met with meaningful action and a commitment to ongoing improvement.
What our Partners Say
In transitioning to Safe Systems, Michigan Department of Health & Human Services has experienced improvement, innovation, and sustainable change.
Indiana Department of Child Services implemented a Safety Culture with Safe System integration through ongoing staff education.
Pacific Clinics incorporated the Safe Systems Improvement Tool in their practice serving clients ranging in age from youth through advanced adulthood.