Caring for Care Providers:

From 2020-2021, turnover rates in Oregon's community mental healthcare settings skyrocketed from from an average of 25% per year to 45% per year. My fellow researcher Hafsa Aden and I wanted to understand what was driving these turnover rates, so we embarked on an in-depth research journey to identify the most common causes of burnout in mental healthcare providers working with low-income clients. As part of our research, we joined our participants in an ideation session to co-design opportunities for change, and I created systems maps and storyboards to help us visualize the problem space and potential solutions.

Hafsa and I created a discussion guide and held hour-long qualitative interviews with ten mental healthcare providers. We had three main objectives: first, to discover the common challenges that mental healthcare providers face when working with low income clients; second, to discover what’s helped providers prevent or recover from burnout in the past; and third, to provide a space for practitioners to discover opportunities to ease burdens and reduce burnout. We were able to speak with a wide range of people, from clinic managers to students just entering the field. We created personas based on our interviews and distilled out conversations into five key findings:

Qualitative interviews helped us to understand the day-to-day pain points of practitioners, but I also wanted to explore a wider view of the problem space through systems thinking and mapping. Using information from our interviews, as well as my own desk research, I created several systems maps to share with practitioners and reference during our ideation sessions. These maps explored the larger driving forces behind rising turnover rates in the field, as well as key elements of future visions as described by practitioners.

Finally, we hosted an ideation session for practitioners to brainstorm helpful design interventions for the challenges they faced. Throughout the interviews, several practitioners had expressed difficulties in finding resources and services to help address basic needs for their clients (like food and shelter) that needed to be met before therapeutic work could really begin. Practitioners had an idea for an online database of local resources that they could use to quickly and easily find services for their clients. I created a storyboard to help visualize how a database like this could fit into a practitioners workflow and help take some of the burdens off of themselves and their low-income clients.