TYPES OF FOSTER CARE PROGRAMS
Traditional Foster Care
Traditional foster care services provides shelter, food, nurturing, and love to a child who is in the care of the state. Traditional foster care children come from different backgrounds and have individual needs.
Specialized Foster Care
Specialized foster care services include traditional foster care servies and may include caring for a child with special physical, emotional, psychological, or social needs. Families whose foster children have specialized needs receive additional training in medical services, behavior management, and work in conjunction with professionals who provide these services. A child with specialized needs will often require more frequent doctors visits, or visits with other professionals, and may require special equipment or services provided in the home.
Therapeutic Foster Care
Therapeutic foster parents are specially trained and receive continuous support to provide foster family care for children of any age. Children enter into this program with identified emotional or physical problems that require a specific plan. This plan includes short and long term goals for the foster child's emotional, physical, developmental, and educational needs.
The goal for the child could be preparation for adoptive placement, reunification with the child's birth family, long-term placement in the treatment foster home, or emancipation into adulthood. Each child's plan is individual and unique. Foster parents participate as part of a treatment team that may include the social worker, a therapist, the school, and other stakeholders involved in the child's plan of care.
Developmentally Disabled/Medically Fragile Foster Care
The Developmentally Disabled / Medically Fragile Foster Care Program providesexperienced and skilled foster homes for foster children who have such special needs. The program focuses on the recruitment, certification, education,retention, and support of foster parents who have experience and knowledge of the special needs of children who are developmentally delayed or disabled and children who are medically fragile.
FOSTER CARE SERVICES
Unique Caring Foundation's Foster Care Program provides recruitment, training, certification and retention services for foster care providers. Foster Care Homes provide temporary substitute care for children ages 0 through 18, who have been removed from their families due to neglect, the parent being unavailable, or physical, sexual or emotional abuse.
Foster parents offer day-to-day care and guidance until the child can be reunited with his or her birth family, moved to a kinship family or permanent adoptive home or emancipated. Caseworkers work closely with foster care parents to identify and meet the special needs of the child/children, who is/are in placement care.