Commissioner Reports Reduced CPS Vacancies

The West Virginia Legislature’s Joint Committee on Health heard updates about staffing shortages in social services.

During the interim legislative session, Commissioner of the Bureau for Social Services Jeffrey Pack provided updates on hiring and retention initiatives in the department.

To encourage more people to apply, the agency is paying higher rates for Berkeley, Jefferson and Morgan counties, due to their location at a competitive border of the state.

“We have also implemented a number of workforce initiatives that have really borne some amazing fruit,” Pack said. “We implemented a pay differential or expanded a pay differential for the eastern panhandle, which has done a great deal to address our workforce shortages there.”

He said the bureau’s vacancy rate has been reduced from 31 percent in January to 19 percent as of June 2023.

Pack credits this reduction with pay increases for those who work multiple years of service in the department.

“We also did retention incentives for folks who were hired after June 19 of last year, and those are 10 percent increases at two years, 10 percent at four years, 5 percent at both six and eight years of service,” Pack said. “This has made remarkable progress in our workforce.”

Another retention tool the department is using is trauma response for Child Protective Service (CPS) workers.

“So as you can imagine, folks who work in CPS are oftentimes the victim of seeing unthinkable things. And we’ve done a number of things to try to alleviate that,” Pack said. “One the department has provided coverage for mental health services. So if folks need to go out and see a mental health provider, they can do that at no cost to themselves. We worked with Marshall University Center for Excellence in Recovery to develop and implement practices to address trauma.”

Appalachia Health News is a project of West Virginia Public Broadcasting with support from Charleston Area Medical Center and Marshall Health.