Connecting Child Welfare into one central database

The Child Protection Information Network (CPIN) is a single, modern information system developed by the Ministry of Children and Youth Services to enhance child welfare services across the province and it is now coming to North Eastern Ontario Family and Children’s Services (NEOFACS).

CPIN is part of Ontario’s ongoing commitment to ensure children and youth receiving Children’s Aid Society (CAS) services have every opportunity to reach their full potential. Through better information sharing among CASs across the province, for the purposes of child welfare services only, CPIN enables timely and efficient services for children and their families.

We are going LIVE on Monday, October 29, 2018. What we do with child welfare services will remain the same, but how we do it will change.

It is important to note that during the weeks following our go-live date, we may experience delays and take longer than normal to respond to non-critical issues.

We appreciate your patience and understanding as we make this transition solely with our Child Welfare Services.

About CPIN

CPIN is the single province-wide information system for all CASs in Ontario. As an enterprise-wide provincial system, managed by the ministry, CPIN will result in more consistent and standardized business practice amongst CASs, provide a common set of service and financial data for the ministry and the CAS sector, and will enable further transformation of the child welfare sector.

CPIN will:

  • Enhance child safety by providing CASs with increased standardized capacity to consistently track children and their service outcomes as well as the ability to seamlessly transfer critical case history information across CASs;
  • Improve CAS management and ministry oversight by enabling more timely, accurate and comparable data and reporting on services and expenditures and benefits realization across CASs; and,
  • Reduce administrative burden on child welfare personnel by increasing efficiencies, reduce duplication of effort and resources, and simplifying administrative and process flow within CASs, between CASs, and between the ministry and CASs.

How will this change our work?

CPIN makes more information available to child welfare workers than previously possible, with strong protections and protocols in place to ensure information is used appropriately. Staff are assigned CPIN roles, which limit the data and information they can access and protecting privacy is a priority.

CPIN will not change how we work with families and children, only how we record information and obtain information from other agencies.

How will this affect you?

Moving to CPIN on October 29 will be a major change in our internal day-to-day activities. During implementation, we expect our Child Welfare workers to be busier than usual.

Once this implementation process is completed – probably by the end of the year – we will be back to our usual level of community involvement.

We hope you will see some positive changes with our Child Welfare services once CPIN is fully implemented.

For more information about CPIN and specific changes, please contact cpin@neofacs.org.