Child Welfare Service Adaptations during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Balancing Worker Safety and Doing Essential Work

Despite this lack of a designation, we centralize the issue of essential work in our analysis to underscore the challenges faced by child welfare workers and the potential supports that can be provided in and out of their work settings as the pandemic continues to unfold. [...] The socio-ecological model allows for the examination of the interaction between the individual, the community (e.g., work), and the environment (COVID-19 and its impact) (Kilanowski 2017). [...] Data Gathering The team consulted with their contacts in the Child Welfare League of Canada (CWLC) and the Ontario Association of Children’s Aid Societies (OACAS), who assisted with the promotion of the research. [...] Study Limitations As a qualitative study of eleven participants, this study is not a representation of the experiences of child welfare workers and managers in Ontario and the findings cannot be generalized, but it documents the participants’ understandings, worries, and responses to the pandemic. [...] One of the implications of this is the inequity in terms of women-led households and single-parent households on the one hand and male-dominated management with a great deal of power, on the other.