Process Improvement in the Community Service Sector

1. Assessment Programs, Process Improvement in the Community Service Sector Roxane Zuck Monarch Recovery Services Partners in Achieving Change Excellence. 282 Lourdes, Sudbury, ON P3B 2V6 705-222-8463 > neha.singh@yourpace.ca

2. Improvement process for Assessment Programs Roxanne Zuck, Program Supervisor, from Monarch Recovery Services, identified that the Pregnancy Parenting Outreach Program (PPOP) assessment process was taking a long time. Roxanne decided to take action in order to reduce the time it took to perform the assessment. By using Green Belt/Productivity Leader tools, an informed problem statement was developed and a scope of work was identified. The background information and current conditions were then analyzed in order to create clear goals. This led to successfully overcoming this challenge, saving time for all stakeholders and eliminating waitlists for clients. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY “Quote here” -client Considering this background information, the problem statement was then clearly defined as: The intake process for different programs varied and caused delays in services. ANALYSIS A Root Causes Analysis and process map were completed. Through these analytic tool it was determined that one of the main issues was that the assessment form was 6 pages long. This caused the case manager to have an overloaded schedule. By using the Root Causes Analysis tool, it was determined that the questionnaire used for PPOP assessments had been formulated by copying the treatment plus assessment form questions relevant to PPOP clients. This resulted in some of the questions on the form being irrelevant to the assessment process, as the treatment specific information included on the form was not required to open a file for a PPOP client. LAUNCH AND EXPLORE Background information was gathered and the Current state conditions were defined in order to determine an informed problem statement and scope of work. Upon exploring the current state, some conditions were found, including the following: The Assessment Coordinator only conducted assessments for Women's Treatment and for the Women's Aftercare. Case Managers for the PPOP were taking referrals for individuals who may or may not be appropriate for their program. Furthermore, the form had many questions on it that were not relevant to PPOP and took a significant amount of time to complete. Often times the case manager would then refer the client to treatment where they did the assessment over again with the assessment coordinator. Once the root cause of the problem was determined it became clear what the Goals of the project were. GOALS: Four goals were outlined in order to address the challenge outlined in the problem statement. The goals were defined as follows:

3. (1) to have all the assessments done by the assessment office, In order to make the assessment forms more user friendly/shorter, and to improve access to services for clients, we eliminated the irrelevant questions and reduced the assessment form from 6 pages to 2 pages. (2) to reduce the wait time for services, (3) to make the assessment forms more user friendly/shorter, Results showed a time reduction of 66% to conduct assessments was accomplished. Assessments went from taking 60 to 120 minutes, to an average of 20 to 30 minutes too complete. As a result, the waitlist for PPOP was eliminated within 2 weeks of implementation. (4) and to make access to services better for clients. RESULTS The first 2 goals; to have all the assessments done by the assessment office and to reduce the wait time for services were addressed by training the Assessment Coordinator in asking personal questions in a way that solicits honest and straight forward answers. It was found that it aided in completing the assessments in a more timely fashion.