How might we improve access to drug and alcohol treatment services?
Allegheny County Department of Human Services
CHALLENGE
Accessing drug and alcohol treatment can be difficult, overwhelming, and confusing. Our team had an objective to describe "what does it take" to access drug and alcohol treatment in the county and identify opportunities for improving access.
ROLE
Project lead, qualitative researcher
RESPONSIBILITIES
Overall lead for the working team which included general project management; research design; preparing research documents such as interview scripts and note-taking templates; recruiting participants via community providers DHS staff, and snowball sampling; conducting in-home qualitative interviews; analyzing qualitative research as part of a collaborative team affinity mapping session; preparing summary report; presenting research findings to department leadership
PROCESS
We followed a human-centered design framework to conduct generative research with consumers currently in treatment, family members, people in recovery, and subject matter experts including administrators, treatment staff, research professionals. We listened to heartfelt stories about the struggles accessing treatment, the people and interactions that made the process a little bit easier, and suggestions for what the county could do better. During our interviews, we created visual maps briefly outlining the major touch points to review together and narrow in on specific pain/joy points (see Figure A). As a team, we completed a synthesis session transferring our interview summaries to post-it notes to create themes and insight statements (see Figure B.) These insight statements were then presented to our project stakeholders with "How Might We" questions to launch us into the next phase of research- brainstorming solutions.
Figure A. As part of our field research interviews (which took place in treatment centers, homes/apartments, coffee shops), we carefully listened to narratives about how people entered substance use treatment. In the course of the interviews, we took notes in the form of visual journeys to review with participants to make sure we heard them correctly and also as artifacts to later reference when constructing an aggregate journey