CASE STUDY: JMP007
Treatment Facility
by Marlene Smith, University of Colorado Denver Business School
Key Concepts: Summary statistics, time series plots, normal quantile plots, two sample t-Test, unequal variance test, Welch's test
University of Colorado Denver
Objective
Determine what effect a reengineering effort had on the incidence of behavioral problems and turnover at a treatment facility for teenagers.
Background
The New Life Residential Treatment Facility is a nonprofit foundation that treats teenagers who have shown signs of mental illness. It provides housing and supervision of teenagers who are making the transition from psychiatric hospitals back into the community. Because many of the teenagers were severely abused as children and have been involved with the juvenile justice system, behavioral problems are common at New Life. Employee pay is low and staff turnover is high.
A reengineering program was instituted at New Life with the goals of lowering behavioral problems of the kids and decreasing employee turnover rates. As a part of this effort, the following changes were made:
- Employee shifts were shortened from 10 hours to 8 hours each day.
- Employees were motivated to become more involved in patient treatments. This included encouraging staff to run various therapeutic treatment sessions and allowing staff to have more say in program changes.
- The activities budget was increased.
- A facility-wide performance evaluation system was put into place that rewarded staff participation and innovation.
- Management and staff instituted a program designed to raise expectations about appropriate behavior from the kids. This included strict compliance with reporting of behavioral violations, insistence on participation in therapeutic sessions, and a lowered tolerance for even moderate behavioral infractions.
To determine the effectiveness of the reengineering effort, a data set comprised of pre- and post-reengineering periods was compiled. The information contains two measures of behavioral problems. A critical incident occurs when a resident goes AWOL (leaves the premises without permission), destroys property (e.g., punching a hole in a wall or throwing furniture through windows), is caught in possession of street drugs, or engages in assault against other residents or staff members. A teenager is temporarily removed from the facility when s/he is sent to jail or back to a psychiatric hospital.
The Task
Determine what effect, if any, the reengineering effort had on the incidence behavioral problems and staff turnover.