What to do With New Ideas for Improving Your Program?

In the field of mental healthcare, the success rates of even the most effective clinical programs and interventions are only around 70%.  That means that 30 of every 100 clients end up not getting any significant benefit from our best services.  Clearly, we have a long way to go to improve what we are doing.

 As a Peer Support Specialist, you are likely to see places where clinical programming can improve.  You see things from the clients’ perspective more than most other clinicians.  You have “fresh eyes”, meaning that you will often see clinical services in a way that others may not – in a way that will help you identify new ways to make them better.  But what to do with those ideas.  Consider the following strategies:

1.     Evaluate Your Ideas to Determine if They “Have Legs”.  This is a complex skill that you will develop over time. You want to look at your ideas in terms of whether they will actually have a positive impact, but also whether they are practical and can garner enough support from the organization to be put in place.  If your idea meets those criteria, then you are ready to talk to colleagues to gather their input.

2.     Getting Feedback/Input from Others.  Even your best ideas are likely to have drawbacks that you’ve not thought of.  Running new ideas by co-workers is a great way to draw on their varied experience to find potential barriers and drawbacks.  Develop a group of coworkers that you trust to give you thoughtful feedback.  Beware of the ‘naysayers’ – those people who specialize in explaining why nothing new will ever work.  Look for coworkers who have vision and are open to finding new ways to improve your work.

3.     Building Partnerships.  If you’ve collected feedback from others and you still think your idea has potential, you will want to look for the relevant partners and start to engage them.  Think about who you will need to implement the idea.  Who will have a say in whether the idea can be supported in terms of labor or money or permissions.  Again, look for partners who have at least some sense of vision.  Meet with them and explain your idea and what you would want from them.  Listen to their feedback and incorporate it in your plan.

4.     Collecting Data to Support Your Intervention’s Effectiveness.  They key managers who you are likely to have to persuade will want to see data.  This is the norm for that group – they like to see evidence that an idea will work before they will invest time and resources into it.  It does not have to be a formal research study.  Simple data showing the opinions of potential clients or even data from a pilot trial of the new idea with a few clients will be much more persuasive than a good idea with no data.

5.     Framing the Idea.  You will need to persuade other people that your idea is worth trying.  This will depend in part, on how big the problem is that your idea will solve, and how costly your idea will be to implement.  There is a common way to frame new ideas that often helps others to buy into them.  Consider this formula:

·        Describe the problem you want to solve.  Identify all of the negative aspects to the problem – the suffering of the people not being helped, the impact on the healthcare system, the implications for families, employers, the community etc.  Emphasize the negatives.

·        Describe what has already been done to try to solve this problem and how these efforts have not worked.  Be specific about what you or others have been doing and why these have not succeeded.  Again, emphasize the negatives.

·        Frame your idea and explain why it is uniquely positioned to solve this problem.  Talk about how it is different from what others have done and why that will make it successful.  Be frank about the cost in terms of labor or money – your audience will see those and you don’t want to look like you don’t see them.  But emphasize the benefits of potential success.

6.     Finding Funding.  New programming may require new funding.  You want to develop skills and knowledge about how to find funding for your new ideas.  Talk to your supervisor and colleagues about how new funds are distributed in your organization.  Are there opportunities to request new funds or to apply for funding for new projects?  Are there key people in your organization who are responsible for this and who you should talk with?  Can your supervisor help in this effort?  All organizations have ways to assign funds to new projects – you want to understand that process and use it.

Persistence Over Time.  In my experience, even the best ideas will take time and persistence to implement.  It will take time for people to understand how the new idea can help.  It will take time to gather the support and garner the funding to make it happen.  Depending on the size of the idea, you may be talking years more than months.  The current programming took years to develop and so it is unreasonable to expect to change it in weeks.  Remember to be patient and persistent in your efforts to move the system forward.

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