Are Visitation Plans Required?

The organization must consider whether there is a requirement to create visitation plans and record visits on the outcome plan. This is especially relevant for child and adult protection outcome plans. Visitation plans allow a worker to specify and describe planned interactions that occur between individuals. For example, for Child Welfare, visitation plans describe interactions between the child in an out-of-home placement and family members (parents or relatives) or other participants. If visits are configured for the outcome plan, the worker has the ability to log and evaluate visits as part of a review. If visits are applicable to an outcome plan, a number of additional options can be set and should be considered when configuring the outcome plan:

• What percentage of the duration of a visit is considered acceptable? For example, if the expected duration for visits is set to 1 hour on the visitation plan, and the percentage duration is set to 50%, visits which last for 30 minutes or longer will be considered compliant from the duration perspective.
• What are the upper and lower age limits for the clients to be visited. For example, for a child welfare plan, the limits may be set to 0 and 21, so that all clients on an outcome plan aged 21 and under can be added as clients to visit on a visitation plan.