A Winning Combination

In two recent blogs, Christine Mulvin talked about the value of using graphs and charts to describe activities and data. I just finished six site visits related to the Foundation's Getting and Keeping People in Substance Use Disorder Treatment: Using the NIATx Approach and was reminded of this fact. At the site visits, potential grantees showed us problems that they found during a walk-through of initial client requests for services and the intake and assessment procedures. Some of them used flow charts to describe their procedures and the changes that they made. Others used graphs to show the results of rapid changes they had done to increase client engagement or retention in services over a two or three week period. It was so much easier to see what was going on within the agencies when they used these visual methods to share their activities. It was also obvious to us on our visits which agencies were having easier times collecting data and using it and which agencies were having more difficulty.

The other thing that stood out at these visits was that data did not tell the entire story. The passion that people had for their work came through in the client and agency vignettes that they shared (or did not share) as they talked about the goal of engaging and retaining clients in addiction treatment. At one site visit, we heard the story of a person who would have waited 21-28 days to get into treatment using old procedures, but now was getting into treatment one day after the initial call because of the changes that were made in agency procedure. The staff were excited because they knew that this change would improve the person interest in the early part of treatment and reduce resistance to the personal changes needed to gain and maintain sobriety. For the Foundation staff, the combination of data communicated in an understandable way and passion for the people whom agencies treat is a winning combination.