Connecticut Mental Health Center
Professional, 2015-2016
In collaboration with Yale SOM Outreach Nonprofit Consulting
Introduction: The Connecticut Mental Health Center was reorganizing their Outpatient Services to improve staff and patient wellness, and reached out to Yale School of Management's Outreach Nonprofit Consulting (ONC) to conduct research to this end, using a design thinking approach. I was part of one five-person team within ONC assigned to this client.
The Role: I worked as part of a team of consultants to design and execute formative and evaluative research, and propose a new service design framework.
The Challenge: CMHC's past internal research showed that mental healthcare providers at the Center were themselves in poor mental health. The task was to help CMHC narrow its wellness efforts within Outpatient Services and identify workplace wellness initiatives to foster an integrated staff/patient "culture of wellness." More specifically, the goal was to better understand and target the underlying motivations of stress at CMHC.
Methods of Discovery: Observation and visual documentation, In-Depth Interviews, Task Analysis, Survey Analysis. Synthesis through ideation, prototyping, and iterating.
Insights: Stress and wellness concerns at CMHC were largely rooted in an ineffective organizational structure that led to strained social and professional relationships, a loss of agency/control, lack of transparency, and little individual voice within hierarchy.
Solutions: (1) Reframe stress and wellness as more than physical. (2) Reframe internal staff survey instruments to probe needs and motivations before solutions (3) Build on inclusive transformation process through multiscalar service design transformation -- with several touchpoints -- that increases individual agency and self-determination.
Impact: CMHC addressed our more holistic understanding of stress and stressors as part of their performance improvement goals and new survey instruments, moving away from focusing on specific services (e.g. food) to organizational structure and relationships.