Xinyu Addae-Lee | Hybrid public-private model for adoption: A strategic response to systemic delays

Jamaica’s adoption system is at a pivotal moment. The recent CAPRI report, Home Advantage: Reforming Jamaica’s Adoption System, provides a comprehensive diagnosis of the structural barriers preventing timely placement of children in permanent families.

The report identifies chronic staffing shortages, excessive caseloads, institutional inertia, and an overly cautious administrative culture as core contributors to persistent delays in adoption. These challenges not only frustrate prospective adoptive parents but, more importantly, expose vulnerable children to prolonged institutional care, with significant long-term developmental consequences.

The report offers solutions the first of which is increasing staffing levels, but that is no easy feat and is not likely to happen any time soon. A hybrid adoption framework, allowing prospective adopters to engage private attorneys within a carefully structured Public-Private Partnership (PPP) model, could be deployed within months. This system would mirror Jamaica’s successful partnership between the Ministry of Health (MOH) and private general practitioners, combining public oversight with private-sector capacity to improve efficiency, accountability, and outcomes.

STRUCTURAL BOTTLENECKS

The CAPRI report makes clear that Jamaica’s low rate of non-kin adoption is not due to cultural resistance or lack of demand. Instead, it stems primarily from staffing shortages, excessive workloads, and institutional caution, which together create prolonged delays in matching children with approved families.

Social workers at the Child Protection and Family Services Agency (CPFSA) carry caseloads far exceeding international benchmarks. This severely limits their capacity to advance adoption investigations, complete assessments in a timely manner, and move cases through the system. Administrative culture further compounds these delays, prioritizing procedural caution over child-centred timelines.

As a result, children often remain in state care during the most developmentally sensitive years of their lives. CAPRI highlights that such prolonged institutionalisation erodes cognitive, emotional, and social development, increasing long-term risks of poor educational outcomes, mental health challenges, and social marginalisation.

Simultaneously, prospective adopters experience the process as bureaucratic, impersonal, and opaque, while birth parents often perceive the system as unsafe, morally fraught, or emotionally alienating. These dynamics discourage cooperation, slow consent processes, and contribute to systemic gridlock.

HYBRID ADOPTION FRAMEWORK

Under a hybrid system; Prospective adopters would be allowed to engage private attorneys to manage the legal and procedural aspects of adoption, Social work investigations, child assessments, and safeguarding functions would remain with CPFSA social workers, preserving public oversight and child protection and in the future, licensed private social workers could be integrated, subject to regulation, accreditation, and oversight.

This arrangement would formalise practices that already exist informally, introducing transparency, accountability, and regulatory safeguards, while significantly expanding operational capacity.

The cost of this hybrid system could be managed through two flexible mechanisms:

1. Fully Private Model – Prospective adopters may choose to fully finance attorney fees and associated professional costs.

2. Public-Private Partnership (PPP) Model – Government could contract private attorneys at pre-determined hourly rates, with caps on billable hours per case, like the MOH-private GP arrangement. This approach allows: Cost containment, Predictable budgeting, Expanded service capacity without long-term payroll expansion.

This dual financing approach balances access, equity, efficiency, and fiscal sustainability.

One of the most transformative benefits of this model is that it enables placement of children with prospective adopters from birth, once legal safeguards are satisfied. This allows for immediate bonding and attachment, avoiding the devastating effects of early institutionalisation.

CAPRI’s findings reinforce international evidence that early, permanent family placement is the single most powerful intervention for improving child outcomes. Marking the first three years as the most crucial. Institutional care, even when well-managed, cannot replicate the consistent emotional attachment and cognitive stimulation required for healthy development.

Early placement, enhances emotional security, supports neurological development, improves long-term educational and social outcomes and reduces public expenditure on residential care.

EXPANSION ALONE NOT ENOUGH

While increasing CPFSA staffing is desirable, it may not be realistic. CAPRI identifies staffing shortages as a core bottleneck, yet the scale of recruitment required raises serious questions: Where will Jamaica find an additional 300-400 qualified social workers? How long will training take? Will birth parents trust newly trained personnel? Can the national budget sustain this expansion over the long term?

A hybrid system bypasses these constraints by leveraging existing private-sector expertise, rapidly expanding service capacity without overwhelming public finances.

Enhancing Trust Among Birth Parents

Birth parents often experience fear, shame, uncertainty, and emotional distress. CAPRI notes that many perceive the formal adoption system as unsafe or morally fraught, which contributes to reluctance, withdrawal, and delayed consent.

Allowing birth parents and adoptive families to interact through trusted legal advocates can, increase confidence in procedural fairness, improve transparency, encourage earlier engagement, reduce adversarial dynamics.

Critically, choice matters. No one should be forced to engage with an agent they do not trust, especially in circumstances involving deep vulnerability and emotional trauma.

The hybrid model also facilitates structured open adoptions, aligning with CAPRI’s recommendation to move beyond Jamaica’s rigid closed-adoption framework.

This can include, exchange of letters and photographs, periodic updates, carefully guided visits where appropriate. When professionally supported, open adoption, reduces trauma for birth parents, supports healthy identity formation for adoptees, enhances emotional stability, encourages more women to choose formal adoption over unsafe informal arrangements.

LEGAL EXPERTISE

Attorneys bring critical legal insight that can challenge administrative inertia, correct procedural errors, and enforce statutory timelines.

One example illustrates the system’s current dysfunction: a foster parent was reportedly told she must wait until a minor birth mother turned 18 before consent to adoption could be given – leaving the child in care for four additional years. This interpretation is incorrect. Under common law principles, a minor parent who has assumed parental responsibilities qualifies as an emancipated minor, capable of giving legally valid consent.

Legal advocacy ensures, correct interpretation of law, timely court applications, accountability for procedural failures. This strengthens fairness, consistency, and efficiency across the system.

Crucially, this hybrid model does not require legislative reform. Attorneys can be contracted through PPP arrangements directly to the CPFSA, operating fully within the existing statutory framework.

This enables rapid deployment, bypassing lengthy legislative delays while delivering immediate operational improvements.

By formalising a process that already exists informally which lends itself to extortion of the adoptive parents and exploitation of the birth parents, this model creates structured protections such as transparent fee schedules, regulated professional conduct, oversight mechanisms, safeguards for birth parents, legal protections for adoptive families.

Rather than increasing risk, the model reduces opportunities for coercion, misinformation, and exploitation.

CAPRI’s Home Advantage makes a compelling case that timely adoption is both a child-protection imperative and a national development strategy. The hybrid public-private model directly addresses the report’s key concerns: staffing shortages, administrative caution, excessive delays, and institutional inertia.

By, expanding professional capacity, accelerating placements, strengthening legal oversight, enhancing trust and choice, and supporting early bonding. This model offers Jamaica an achievable practical, humane, and fiscally responsible pathway to reform, ensuring that children grow not in institutions, but in families.

Dr Xinyu Addae-Lee is a medical doctor and attorney-at-law. Send feedback to reply@consultthedoc.com and columns@gleanerjm.com