Re-Thinking Therapeutic Residential Care (TRC) as a Preventive Service: Examining Developments in the US and England

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe purpose of this paper is to examine similarities and differences in recent English and U.S. initiatives which impact the residential child care sector. The English section summarizes the catalysts for and findings of recent enquiries, and presents a skeletal outline of one particular innovative program from North Yorkshire (an English public child welfare agency) – No Wrong Door (NWD) (Lusheyet al., 2017; Rees et al., 2017) which has attracted a good deal of attention nationally and internationally from government and voluntary service bodies searching for a way forward to locate a renewed residential care component in an overall service array. The U.S. section summarizes the import of recent federal legislation, the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) (Kelly, 2018) and a key state initiative Residentially-Based Services (RBS) (McDowellet. al., 2014) in California which shares many of the goals of the federal initiative and is already underway in key agencies undertaking program re-design efforts across the state. The final section of the paper summarizes key take-away messages and highlights implications for future cross-national collaboration in policy and program development, as well as research.