Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services Commissioner Jeanne Lambrew announced on Monday that her agency is moving swiftly to respond to a report showing there have been 26 child deaths since 2017.
Lambrew talked about the agency’s response during Maine Public Radio’s call-in show Maine Calling with host Jennifer Rooks, who asked how many of the reported deaths were related to abuse or neglect.
Rooks: Yesterday, your department outlined new policies to protect children in Maine. And that news release notes that 26 young children in Maine have died in just the last couple years. Two terrible cases that made headlines appear to be child abuse or neglect. Of those 26 cases how many of those were child abuse and neglect and how many were something else?
Lambrew: So while privacy considerations and confidentiality laws prevent us from releasing additional information at this point, what we have done is looked at the long-term trends to see what might be driving this. And we’ve identified two. The first is unsafe sleeping for babies. Since 2014, 45 percent of child deaths in Maine were related to unsafe sleep environments. What that means is that we want parents to place babies on their back to sleep on a firm surface free of loose bedding and soft objects and keep the rooms at comfortable temperatures, so there’s no need for the babies have blankets near their mouths. So we are encouraging parents and we’re going do a campaign out of our CDC to encourage more promote to promote these safe sleeping habits. We also know that, sadly, too many of these babies are born to parents with addiction. Recently a report came out that found that 33 percent of child abuse victims have parents with active drug abuse disorder and 18 percent of those children have a parent with alcohol use disorders. So we are going to try to provide those parents with extra home visits from our public health nursing program, our home visitation program to make sure that they know what services and supports are there for them to help keep their babies safe.
I know that we’ve read over and over that these caseworkers are really overwhelmed. How is DHHS going to provide extra home visits when the staff is having a hard time just keeping up?
To be clear the home visits will be provided by two different programs. One is our public health nursing program which is run out of the CDC. The other would be the home visitation program that is run out of the Office of Child and Family Services. Those people doing those home visits are not the child care caseworkers, the protective services workers, they’re different. So we’re trying to provide extra help and extra people coming in to support families, not try to add more work for the child care caseworkers.
And for the child care caseworkers for Child Protective Services, what next for that department?
Well we are from Day 1 trying to identify challenges and opportunities. We are grateful for the Legislature last year providing funding that has allowed us to hire more than 100 staff to fill vacancies, including 82 new caseworkers. We also have been giving child welfare workers what they’ve been asking for in part, like background information on individuals when checking to see if there’s been abuse and neglect. So we have done a test, or a pilot, of a background check unit, which has conducted more than 2,100 checks since Jan. 1, which contributes to the safety of the children. We also have hired and we’re very excited to bring on a national leader to be the first permanent director of the office since 2017. Dr. Todd Landry is coming to Maine having served in the state of Nebraska and running a nonprofit for children for years. He also is on the board of the Child Welfare League of America. He starts in less than two weeks and we expect him to bring leadership as well as the resources. We’re working with the legislature too, to really build a strong workforce on the backs, and I need to say this, of people in the front lines who are really dedicated. I mean this is more of a challenge of trying to figure out how do we create the systems to support those child care protective workers who are doing a good job, who want to do a good job. This is not about them not doing a good job. This is about trying to build a system to support them so they can help families keep children safe, unify when possible and make sure there’s a permanent solution for those children who are at risk.
This interview has been edited for clarity. To listen to Lambrew’s full appearance on Maine Calling, click here.