Child & Adolescent Needs and Strengths Assessment (CANS)

The Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS) is an assessment process in addition to a multi-purpose tool developed for children’s services to: support decision making, e.g., level of care and service planning, facilitate quality improvement initiatives, and monitor the outcomes of services. The measure is based on research findings that “optimally effective treatment of children and youth should include both efforts to reduce symptomatology and efforts to use and build strengths” (Lyons, 2009).