Creating a Culture of Safety Within Your Organization

The NYS Justice Center prevents abuse from entering the direct care system in a variety of ways. 

In today's episode, we sit down with Davin Robinson, Deputy Director of Outreach, Prevention, and Support, to discuss how providers can create a culture of safety within their organizations, including the importance of the Staff Exclusion List, background checks, and the training offered by the Justice Center. We also delve into the numerous prevention resources created by the agency, including our brand-new “Could This Happen in Your Program?” Toolkit.  

For our inaugural episode, we also sit down with Acting Executive Director Maria Lisi-Murray for a conversation about the importance of creating environments where abuse simply doesn't happen and discuss why the Justice Center prioritizes abuse prevention. 

Transcript

Erin Hogan (00:10):

Welcome to the New York State Justice Center’s “Could This Happen in Your Program” podcast, where we find collaborative solutions for protecting New York's most vulnerable populations.

Each episode, we will delve into case scenarios, uncovering proven tactics to combat systemic abuse. Listeners can expect to hear from Justice Center staff, agency providers, individuals with lived experience, and more as we explore how we can work together to build a safer New York.

Alright, so we can get right into our first conversation with Ms. Davin Robinson. Thank you for joining us today.

Can you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself, your role at the Justice Center, and your history?

Davin Robinson (00:53):

So, it's an hour-long show. That's great. I am Davin Robinson. I began my career in the last century. I worked for the State of Illinois, their Department of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse. It was the last century. I moved from there to New York City. I worked with the Budget Office and with the Health and Hospitals Corporation. Then moved up to Albany and started walking around the halls of the Capitol advocating for improved mental health policy for children and for people in New York State prisons. And that led me to this little agency called the Commission on Quality of Care, an advocacy for persons with disabilities.

When I worked at HHC and the Budget Office, I quickly learned the best way to get more resources for programs was to talk about the deficits that a program had and how that investment could pay off. And CQC was the only independent place that was really looking critically at service providers. So, I wanted to join in on that. And, so I went over to CQC in 2007, and then we became the Justice Center in 2013.

Erin Hogan (02:06):

Preventing abuse and neglect is everyone's main goal, and we know, how essential our tools like the Staff Exclusion List and our Criminal Background Check process in mitigating abuse and neglect before it happens. And before you start, if you could explain for our listeners what the Staff Exclusion List is and any requirements that providers must go through from a pre-employment check process standpoint.

Davin Robinson (02:28):

Certainly, and I will just say at the beginning, I think these are two very important tools and the Staff Exclusion List, which exists only in New York State, is probably one of the most important tools that we have at our fingertips. So, the Staff Exclusion List was created when the Justice Center was created, and it's meant to bar certain people who've committed serious acts of abuse and neglect from being able to work in the human service sector working with vulnerable populations. We're not saying that they can't work anywhere, we're just saying that it's a vulnerable population, and you've shown you either seriously physically abuse somebody with intent to harm them or sexually abuse them. You do not belong in this business. And so, a provider agency that when they're about to hire somebody, they contact the Justice Center. This list is not public, but they contact, and they ask if their candidate is on the Staff Exclusion List.

And if they are, they are barred from hiring that person. So right from the get-go, that keeps New York safer, keeps those people out.

And then the Criminal Background Check also. We want to make sure that the people who are coming into these provider agencies can work safely with vulnerable populations. And so that is also a very helpful tool. But I want to say most people who work in the service system are good-hearted people. They come to work for the right reason, they're professionals. They care about the people that they are serving. They want them to live productive lives in the community, and we need to protect that workforce as well. And the Criminal Background Check and Staff Exclusion List helps with that as well.

Erin Hogan (04:11):

Excellent. So, what are some of the common challenges providers encounter in their efforts to prevent abuse and neglect? You work with providers very often in your role, so we'd love to hear from you. What are some of the challenges you're seeing on a daily basis?

Davin Robinson (4:24):

Staffing is the most important resource for all of these providers, and there is not enough staffing available right now. And retention is really not very good at many provider agencies. If you don't have sufficient staffing, you'll have a very difficult time doing training because every time you're training somebody, you're pulling them off services, and you've created another staffing shortage. And then the other big contributor, again with staffing, because it's our most important resource, is that sometimes staff will not follow procedures. They'll take shortcuts. It becomes sort of ingrained and it's all well and good to sleep at night until the one night where someone chokes and you were supposed to be up that night. So following agency policies and procedures is really important. And when an agency has policies and procedures and staff follow them and an incident still occurs, then the Justice Center is able to work with the agency and say, this was a systemic failure. This was not the staff's fault. And so you need to develop a corrective action plan and take steps to better protect the people you serve and the staff that are working very hard for you.

Erin Hogan (05:37):

And I think even in addition to staff shortage, I think that also includes staff turnover because then providers are constantly retraining, right? Yes. They're constantly in the effort of training new staff and managing those different levels of experience

Davin Robinson (05:55):

And getting to know the people that you serve that are living in the programs, many of them. And so people have all sort of, some people have different triggers, things that they really like to do, and it's really hard to bring new staff up to speed quickly.

Erin Hogan (06:10):

So we've talked a little bit about the challenges. What resources does the Justice Center offer to help providers and arm them with the tools needed to prevent abuse and neglect?

Davin Robinson (06:22):

Oh, great question. We have so many resources that are free and available on our website that I hope everyone goes to check out. But the first reason

Erin Hogan (06:31):

It's a give me question.

Davin Robinson (06:33):

It's a great website. It's so well organized. So, the first one is the Code of Conduct, which was also created when the Justice Center was created. And it's a page and a half document that anybody who's providing care to people in the service settings under the Justice Center, they must sign this Code of Conduct. And when you sign it, you're pledging to treat people with dignity and respect, follow your agency's policies and procedures, and also report incidents of abuse and neglect. And we don't want that to be a read and sign because we think if you're really following the tenets of the Code of Conduct, you're less likely to be involved in an incident of abuse and neglect. So, we have online, you can take a simple test that goes through all the tenants, it's scenario-based, and it brings the Code of Conduct to life.

We also provide Code of Conduct train-the-trainer sessions for provider agencies so they can bring the Code of Conduct to life in their agency. We also have agency self-assessments on our website that any agency, and we try to tailor them to the different multifaceted systems that we have. And you can pick and choose, but it allows an agency to take a critical look top to bottom of their program and see where they might be vulnerable for incidents of abuse and neglect, and then take action.

We have all sorts of online training in addition to the Code of Conduct. Maintaining Professional Boundaries is a very popular training that we have, and we can do that live and in person as well. And then finally, we have our Spotlights on Prevention, which provide, we base these, we develop these based on common cases that we're seeing and common things that are leading to incidents of abuse and neglect. And so these Spotlights have all sorts of resources available for providers, some training and some training tips and some sample policies, procedures, forms, all sorts of things. And they're all free on the website.

Erin Hogan (08:36):

Yes. We can't tout the website enough here in Communications.

Davin Robinson (08:40):

It's where you find all the good stuff.

Erin Hogan (08:44):

So, speaking of the title of this podcast is, “Could This Happen in your Program?” and that title is derived from a training tool that is featured in many of those toolkits, also in our presentations. And it started right even before the start of the Justice Center. So, can you give us a little background on the history of Could This Happen in Your Program?

Davin Robinson (09:04):

Sure. Great. Great question. Yes, we have all of our toolkits actually have a Could This Happen section.  And they are, again, there are scenarios based on some of the common themes that we see in things that lead up to incidents of abuse and neglect. And so it's a brief summary of the situation and there are some points down below that teachers aid to here's where things broke down, but we encourage those can just be ripped out. And maybe during a team meeting, a treatment team meeting, take 10 or 15 minutes to think about a situation that might happen in your program and are you aware of the nursing plans? Do you have a good way of communicating if you're passing off supervision, for example? And Could This Happen actually was started by the Commission on Quality of Care and Advocacy for Persons with Disabilities. And it was very popular when the Justice Center started, and we developed our spotlights on prevention. We included these scenarios with these points, and providers still would say, but wait, where could this happen? I miss it. And so, we figured we had a good brand. We keep on going with it.

Erin Hogan (10:15):

Well, yes, and now we've turned it into a podcast. So, we're taking the scenarios and we're going to address them on each episode and work with different levels of the agency to talk through how we process a case. Also, we are going to have provider guests, guests with lived experiences, as we said in the introduction. So it's going to be a really great podcast.

And then finally, we just released a Could this happen in your program toolkit, which includes a variety. It's like 47 pages. It's huge.

Davin Robinson (10:46):

It's the comprehensive encyclopedia of things that could go wrong in your program,

Erin Hogan (10:51):

But an excellent training tool. So, can you give us a little bit of a background on that?

Davin Robinson (10:54):

Sure. We worked with our state agency partners and we wanted to just provide a really comprehensive, rich resource for providers to encourage providers to do those things during the treatment team meetings and just brush up on having your abuse prevention mindset going all the time. So, we have all sorts of scenarios that could apply anywhere that people can use, and like I said, they're short and it's easy to just do them every once in a while. So yeah, we're excited about it.

Erin Hogan (11:26):

You can find a link to that toolkit in the notes on this podcast and also on our website. So I think that concludes our time. Thank you so much, Davin, for joining us today, and thank you. We look forward to the next time we can have you.

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Okay. Well, thank you, everyone, for joining us. As I mentioned earlier, we have our Acting Executive Director, Maria Lisa Murray here with us for the second part of our program today. Maria, thank you for joining. Well, I think what might be helpful for our listeners, if you could give us a brief background on your work experience and what you do here at the Justice Center.

Maria Lisi-Murray (12:17):

Sure. Absolutely. So as many people know, I started my professional career as a City of Binghamton police officer. I worked on patrol for approximately three years and then became a Special Investigations Unit investigator for my last four years with the department. I went on to law school and became a trial lawyer. I served as a partner in a City of Binghamton law firm for about 15 years, and then moved on to the New York State Attorney General's office, where I continued my work as a litigation attorney. I then moved into a Chief Risk Officer role at New York State DMV, where I oversaw internal controls, internal audit, our litigation attorneys, and the new risk unit with cybersecurity contained that they're in. And that led me to take a job at the Justice Center, again, overseeing internal controls, internal audit, our internal appeal attorney unit, and setting up the new Quality Assurance unit within the agency. Did that for about seven months, and then was elevated to my current role as Acting Executive Director, and I've been in that role for just over a year.

Erin Hogan (13:37):

You've had like four careers, but it sounds like you're really tailor-made for the Justice Center and all the work. You have the law enforcement background, the legal experience, and you also have some, what sounds like, customer success experience, and trying to work out quality concerns, efficiencies, and processes. So it sounds like you are in the right role.

Maria Lisi-Murray (14:04):

Thank you. Yes. I sort of wonder to myself every day, how can I use this past experience in order to help the agency move forward? And it's just really been enjoyable to take the culmination of all these different things I've done and use every piece of it to benefit the Justice Center and the people we protect.

Erin Hogan (14:25):

So, under your leadership, the Justice Center has increasingly focused on abuse prevention efforts. We're starting this podcast to focus on that. We've increased our materials for providers. What motivated you to emphasize this piece of the Justice Center's work that has largely been focused on investigations in the past? What has caused you to even that playing field?

Maria Lisi-Murray (14:45):

Sure. Well, my history and my professional career really has focused around investigations and investigative practices. I see a lot of value in prevention. If you could prevent abuse and neglect, give our support staff who are doing the hands-on work every day, the tools, the resources that they need, the supports that they need, why wouldn't we do that? Prevention, I think, is absolutely the strongest role that the agency can play in terms of ensuring that abuse and neglect never occur.

Erin Hogan (15:19):

Absolutely. I think we can all certainly agree about that. So, as Acting Executive Director, along those lines, you created the Justice Center's first responder and law enforcement training program. So, this is an excellent training program that launched later last year. Can you elaborate on that? What motivated you to launch this program for that audience?

Maria Lisi-Murray (15:41):

Yes, absolutely. So, as I've said, I have law enforcement, patrol officer, and investigative experience. One of the things that has come to my mind as I've stepped into this role is the fact that law enforcement officers, EMS fire, any first responder who's responding to a call often only has the information from the complainant and it is coming up and having to make life and death decisions very, very quickly. Oftentimes, they don't realize the type of facility that they're responding to or what to expect when they get there, or even how to approach someone who really requires de-escalation, who requires a mindful approach in order to ensure respectful communication and a successful positive outcome.

Erin Hogan (16:34):

Excellent. Along the lines of creating a culture of prevention, I think there's no better example that stopping the negative outcomes before they even start. And I think we can't turn on the news these days without seeing some sort of negative interaction between law enforcement or first responders and individuals with disabilities. So I think it's great that we've launched this program to really highlight and effect change.

Maria Lisi-Murray (17:01):

Absolutely. We've trained over 200 individuals at this point. I think there's a real appetite for this sort of training. You don't go into law enforcement or become a first responder to do harm. You go in to help people. So, I think there's a real niche for this agency to highlight our expertise and ensure better outcomes.

Erin Hogan (17:22):

Excellent. So, looking ahead, what message would you like to convey to providers in the direct care workforce when interacting with the Justice Center? It's been a relationship that we've really worked to cultivate over the years. Curious what your goal is here.

Maria Lisi-Murray (17:40):

Well, I think support staff providers, they need to understand that we are a support for them. We want to provide them the tools, access to the best practices. Our dual mission here is to also support our direct care workforce, and I take that very seriously. Again, I believe prevention, giving them the support they need and offering the Justice Center as a resource on a proactive basis, not just a reactive investigative agency. I think that's going to make a big difference and hopefully improve the care for the folks that we serve.

Erin Hogan (18:18):

Excellent. Well, thank you, Ms. Lisi-Murray. It's been a joy having you here today. For listeners, we've been speaking with Maria Lisi Murray, Acting Executive Director of the New York State Justice Center, and this Could This Happen in Your Program podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you.