Compare methods

	Child Safety Assessment	Evidence-Based Practice Process
Field	Social Work	Social Work
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2003	1996
Originator	Child protective services practice; codified in CPS guidance and Structured Decision Making	Evidence-based medicine tradition (Sackett et al.); translated to social work by Gambrill and others
Type	Structured determination of whether a child faces immediate serious danger	Structured process for integrating evidence, expertise, and client values in practice decisions
Seminal source	Child Welfare Information Gateway. (2018). Child Protective Services: A Guide for Caseworkers. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Children's Bureau.	Sackett, D. L., Rosenberg, W. M. C., Gray, J. A. M., Haynes, R. B., & Richardson, W. S. (1996). Evidence based medicine: What it is and what it isn't. BMJ, 312(7023), 71–72.
Aliases	Safety Assessment (Child Welfare), Present Danger Assessment, Child Protective Services Safety Assessment, Safety Determination	EBP Process, Evidence-Based Practice (Process Model), Five-Step EBP Process, Evidence-Informed Practice Process
Related	4	4
Summary	Child safety assessment is the structured process child protective services uses to decide whether a child faces immediate, serious danger and, if so, what must be done right now to protect them. Unlike risk assessment, which estimates the probability of future maltreatment, safety assessment focuses on the present: it identifies active safety threats, weighs them against the child's vulnerability and the caregivers' capacity to protect, and reaches a safe-or-unsafe determination that, when unsafe, triggers an immediate safety plan up to and including removal.	The evidence-based practice (EBP) process is a structured, five-step way of making practice decisions by integrating the best available research evidence with professional expertise and the client's values and circumstances. Originating in evidence-based medicine as defined by Sackett and colleagues and translated into social work by Eileen Gambrill and others, it reframes EBP not as a fixed list of approved programs but as a transparent decision process — ask, acquire, appraise, apply, assess — that an individual practitioner carries out with and for a particular client.