Practicing Best Practice: A 10‐Year Retrospective on Universal Risk Screening in a Mediation and Counseling Organization

• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Author: Jamie Lee,Claire Ralfs,Anna Booth,Jennifer E. McIntosh
• Date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fcre.12603

PRACTICING BEST PRACTICE: A 10-YEAR RETROSPECTIVE ON

UNIVERSAL RISK SCREENING IN A MEDIATION AND

COUNSELING ORGANIZATION

Jamie Lee, Claire Ralfs, Anna Booth, and Jennifer E. McIntosh

Separation is a high-risk time in families and for many it marks the onset or escalation of family safety and wellbeing risks

like Intimate Partner Violence (IPV). Best practice for identifying such risks in court or community mediation services is

systematic inquiry about safety risks with structured tools to overcome under-reporting of risks. However, turning best prac-

tice recommendations into routine practice can take years –even when the evidence is strong that practitioners and their

clients will ultimately benefit. Relationships Australia South Australia has addressed this evidence-practice gap by engaging

our leadership and undertaking whole-of-organization implementation of the Family DOORS framework. This includes the

validated screening tool DOOR 1, that helps practitioners identify and respond to family-wide risks during peak stress such

as separation. In this article, we review our 10-year implementation journey towards best practice in risk screening, reporting

on 28,097 screens completed with clients to date. We describe the initiatives used to address practitioner and infrastructure

barriers to implementation. We present both quantitative and qualitative indicators of practitioner change along with client

survey data (n=1,291), demonstrating changes in practices that have enhanced client engagement and led to an increase in

client safety and wellbeing outcomes. We share recommendations for and innovations in translation to other service contexts.

We hope that using the following recommendations and adopting the DOORS tools will encourage and enable others to

implement best practice risk screening in far less than 10 years.

Key Points for the Family Law Community

Best practice for identifying safety and wellbeing risks in family law clients requires practitioners to use systematic

structured tools like Family DOORS (Detection of Overall Risk Screen).

Putting best practice into practice, however, can be hard; but it’s not impossible.

This article describes how the barriers to best practice were overcome by an Australian community-based counseling

and mediation organization.

Other organizations and practitioners can use these learnings to implement best practice in their settings more easily.

Keywords: Child Abuse; Implementation; Intimate Partner Violence; Risk Assessment; Risk Screening.

People do not start a family thinking that their relationship will end in separation and their

dependent children will end up without a parent, or living with a step-parent, or growing up some-

where else. When families do separate –as happens for nearly half of families in the Western world

(Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2015) –parents often feel dis-

appointed, depressed, or devastated at how their lives have turned out. Family counseling, media-

tion, and family law services are well positioned to support families with these feelings; and to

intervene when behaviors escalate into safety risks including Intimate Partner Violence (IPV), harm

to children, or suicide. In Australia, over half of separating parents sort through their issues at a

counseling or dispute resolution service, with higher engagement rates observed when IPV is

involved (De Maio, Kaspiew, Smart, Dunstan, & Moore, 2013). IPV is not an isolated issue and is

highly associated with alcohol and drug use, mental health concerns, and parenting stress

(McIntosh, Lee, & Ralfs, 2016). Accordingly, post-separation services and agencies see many

families facing different levels of safety risks even though clients have not approached the service

Corresponding: c.ralfs@rasa.org.au

FAMILY COURT REVIEW, Vol. 59 No. 4, October 2021 697–709, doi: 10.1111/fcre.12603

© 2021 Association of Family and Conciliation Courts.