Measuring CAC Outcomes
Healing, Justice, & Trust: How CACs prove (and improve) their work
Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs) provide children and families with healing and justice in a setting they can trust. We know they do because of more than 95,000 survey responses we collect each year from our caregivers and partners.
NCA’s Outcome Measurement System (OMS) helps CACs define their successes in serving children and families while helping them benchmark their progress against the work of a nationwide movement. As of January 2024, 932 CACs use the OMS program to demonstrate the value of the work that CACs provide to children and families and the success of the CAC model in the eyes of the partners that make it possible.
Are you a CAC staff member looking for training for the OMS program, or an NCA member looking for member-exclusive reports? Visit our landing page on NCA Engage. , or contact Erin Casey below to join OMS for your agency.
Healing, Justice, & Trust
This public version of our Healing, Justice, and Trust report highlights how CACs across the country are doing—as judged by the children and caregivers they serve and the law enforcement, child protective services, and medical personnel they work with in a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to child abuse.
CACs and State Chapters use it to benchmark themselves against the entire CAC field to identify problems and bright spots. We use it to identify common areas the entire movement can work to increase the seamlessness of services so families can recover and kids can go back to being kids.
This report was produced in 2022 from full-year 2021 data. Look for a new edition on the latest data in 2025.
The Youth Feedback Survey
The entire CAC model is based on giving youth a voice—a voice to share what has happened to them and what they need now to heal and move forward in their lives. Asking youth to share feedback about the services they receive at the CAC takes this a step further and shows that children’s opinions regarding the CAC process are truly important. The Youth Feedback Survey is the newest OMS tool and was developed by a team of researchers.
The Youth Feedback Survey is grounded in evidence-informed and developmentally appropriate approaches to giving youth between the ages of 10-17 an opportunity to provide feedback about their experiences. For their privacy and safety, everything but the ages and the exact responses of our child clients is anonymized. But, we are still able to share real quotes from children we served like “Kyra.”
How OMS Works
This two-page brochure highlights how CACs use the OMS program to collect feedback from families and team members, and use results to demonstrate impact and continuously improve services.
How do CACs use OMS?
OMS was developed in Texas in 2009 and then offered by NCA to CACs in other states starting in 2012 as a unified system for evaluating CACs on an individual, state, and national level. Through surveys to caregivers of children they serve, the team members who serve them, and now the children themselves, OMS provides the opportunity for each CAC to not only measure their own performance, but also benchmark themselves against the field. Nearly a thousand centers across all 50 states use OMS to give families and team members a voice in the CAC process, which in turn allows centers to demonstrate their success and find areas for improvement.
OMS allows CACs to report on survey items designed to capture two measurable outcomes:
- The CAC facilitates healing for children and caregivers.
- The MDT approach results in more collaborative and efficient case investigations