The Child Protection Service (CPS) has two basic plans for managing child protection issues and they are the immediate protective strategy, or plan, and the formal plan of continued safety. When a child is in immediate danger, which is something that is usually recognized during the first meeting or contact with a family, CPS puts the immediate protection strategy into place. After the danger has been acknowledged, they place a hold on all of the different activities that take place during an intervention, such as the initial assessment, in order to guarantee immediate protection for the child. When the immediate danger has been acknowledged, CPS has the responsibility of ensuring the child’s safety during the remaining intervention activities. Naturally, an immediate plan should contain certain documentation and elements and the abuse report should reflect those elements.

The formal safety strategy will usually happen during or at the end of the first assessment, after all of the pertinent family information has been taken and analyzed. This formal plan is written on a document and it helps to recognize any foreseeable dangers; it lists child safety products, services and childcare providers.

The two plans have one major difference; the formal child protection plan only gets put into place once all of the full and complete information has been gathered on the child and family. The immediate protective strategy is put into place after only getting a limited amount of information that was disclosed at the initial encounter.

Some feel that there should be additional provisions added to the ones already in use. They believe that safety care management and intervention should be provisional; that it should refer to specific actions and arrangements that CPS may take at the present time based upon current threats to the child’s safety, or if there is not a sufficient childcare provider available to ensure protection.

In this type of arrangement, the provisional means of caring for the child would stay in place, while searching for a better permanent arrangement. According to some at the Child Protection Service, this would entail giving protective responsibility to child care providers with child protection training. Or, they may explore different permanency options outside of the child’s home and family.