Staffing resources impacted the face to face not being met in this case. In July of 2016, the culture of the child welfare system was defensive in nature, as evidenced by an influx in number of reports being made into the CW system, which were being screened in at a higher rate. The defensive practice occurred simultaneous in regard to media scrutiny regarding child welfare practices and following the Governor's Task Force on the Protection of Children releasing 93 recommendations for change to the system's practices. With the local agency having one of the largest populations of child welfare clients served in the state, the increased volume of reports flooding the agency's intake and screening unit was also complicated by continual changes being made to the Intake, Screening and Reponses Path Guidelines, by the Child Safety and Permanency Division's Safety and Prevention Unit. CSP's Safety and Prevention Unit was under pressure to develop implementation guidance based on the 93 Governor's Task Force recommendations. Guidance was also issued for the predatory offender statute put into law in 2012, which required agencies to prioritize making contact with alleged victims within 24 hours, even at times when the alleged victim was not alleged to be in contact with the alleged predatory offender and presumed safe, adding to the amount of reports and cases being assigned to staff of FA/FI units backlogs, trumping all other case assignments, as there was no discretion for the supervisor or staff regarding predatory offender reports. For staff, the frequent updates and changes to guidance during this time added complexity, constraining staff to make goal conflict and trade off decisions as they needed to balance prioritizing allegation, alleged safety and risk, and compliance metrics, as well as more work tasks and documentation to be completed for each case. This lead to more stress as staff were already managing high caseload sizes with limited staffing resources. A demand – resource mismatch existed reinforcing a production pressure cycle of high caseload size, high stress for staff to manage, and staff turnover. During this time, the local agency saw high turnover as frontline staff prioritized their health and wellbeing over attempting to manage high caseload sizes. Further intensifying the staff available for case assignment was staff utilizing LOA to prioritize their health and wellbeing creating an unpredictability if staff out on leave of absence would return to work or not. When staff out on leave did not to return to their position, time was required to hire and onboard a new staff to fill their position, which placed even higher demand and stress on the staff taking on new case assignments, who were already managing high caseloads.  
There was higher demand and pressure on the local agency to meet compliance measures to avoid legislative withholds of money/funding that an agency would not receive when out of compliance. The local agency placed higher importance on meeting 24 hour face to face timelines over 5 day face to face timelines, which was a procedural adaptation made in effort to triage the volume of cases sitting in a backlog of 200-400 reports that were in pending screening and assignment to FA/FI units. Once assigned to FA/FI units, supervisors of each unit prioritized and made the decision for frontline staff to go beyond the 5 day face to face timeline based on the allegation(s) and safety/risk known at the time, such as in this case.