By Daniel Jordan
General Manager
Sunshine Coast Health Center
If there has been one thing that has been a constant at Sunshine Coast Health Center, it’s change. Changes at our residential addiction treatment center tend to occur under four broad categories: (1) program, (2) staffing, (3) services, and (4) facility. Since one of my responsibilities is marketing, it dawned on me that the corporate brochure that we created in the spring of 2007 was due for an overhaul. So, back in March, a new pamphlet was produced that showed our newly-expanded drug rehab center (new building, new indoor exercise pool, expanded fitness center, landscaping, etc.) and enhanced services (mental health services, on-site fitness, off-site recreation). However, after inserting all the new photos that highlighted our facility and campus, there really wasn’t much space left to detail how the clinical program has changed.
So, since the spring, we have been working on creating a brochure that provides additional information that is primarily clinical in nature. Having committed to this project, however, I soon realized that creating a clinical brochure that is comprehensive, user-friendly, and current is a big job!
The Challenge of Being User-Friendly, Current, and Comprehensive
In many ways, this reminds me of the work leading up to our publishing of the 1st edition of the British Columbia Alcohol & Drug Services Directory last November. It was the first time in 8 years that anyone had published anything similar to a directory of this nature (the last Kaiser Directory was published in 2001). I had found a number of BC addiction directories but all of them had one problem or the other. For example, either the information was outdated (again, the Kaiser Directory, many addiction directories found online), or was not presented in a user-friendly fashion (the Red Book in BC has quite a few listings but suffers from excessive categories and bulk), or was not comprehensive (no addiction listings felt that private practice therapists that worked with addicts or 12-Step meetings were worth listing). So, the challenge then became to integrate all of the available information into a publication that was better than the sum of its parts. Based on feedback we have had from many health professionals across BC, it seems as though we have succeeded in our objective. But while I thought the directory was a challenge, it seems as though creating a clinical brochure is a much more difficult task. After five months of internet research and countless visits to libraries, and used bookstores, I figure it’s time to start putting it all together, and what better place to start than our blog?
Challenge #1: Being User-Friendly
When it comes to having a user-friendly clinical brochure a logical presentation of content is necessary. However, a clinical program can’t be arranged in a simple, linear fashion like a novel or historical account. Instead, a framework needs to be designed so that all of the pieces are arranged in such a way that makes sense.
Finding material to aid in the development of a framework has been interesting, to say the least. Philosopher Ken Wilber has been instrumental in creating integral models that embrace the human condition from a subjective (“I” and “We”), objective (organism and environment), and structural (mind, body, soul, spirit) perspective. Ervin Laszlo, a pioneer in systems thinking; Roger Martin, author of The Opposable Mind; and economist E.F. Schumacher have all written on designing models that help explain complex systems. However, incorporating a system so that the system itself does not become the focus of the brochure is going to test the limits of being user-friendly.
Another aspect of being user-friendly is avoiding jargon that is so prevalent in health sciences and philosophy. Relapse Prevention expert Terence T. Gorski once pointed out to me that it’s often a question of languaging: communication can break down when we fail to understand that different words are used to represent the same thing. For example, one clinician may use the term resistance while another uses the term denial to represent the inability or unwillingness of a client to make healthy changes. So, a user-friendly clinical brochure must be presented in a way that doesn’t just assume familiarity with terminology commonly associated with alcohol and drug treatment.
Challenge #2: Being Current
Sunshine Coast Health Center is an evolving entity and that is by design. However, when creating a clinical brochure, information about staffing, programs, and services must be presented in a way that can embrace these changes without becoming outdated. For example, we may decide to change out an adjunct therapy (massage, relaxation, ozone, etc.) based on published research, client feedback, or staff turnover. However, such changes to the clinical program at the programming level does not automatically mean that the program, for example, no longer addresses the physical aspects of addiction.
Highlighting qualifications of staff must also be presented in general terms (such as all counsellors requiring a minimum of a master’s degree) rather than focusing on particular techniques (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, etc.) that individual counsellors possess.
Challenge #3: Being Comprehensive
Addiction is a complex condition that defies a simple solution. While it’s somewhat straightforward to simply provide a list of programs and services, explaining why clinical elements have been included and how all of the clinical elements work together (our philosophy) is another story. A drug treatment program is far more than just it’s ‘bits and pieces’. Furthermore, a good clinical brochure should be able to demonstrate that its programming is supported by evidence-based research if it expects to be supported by the health professional community it needs to remain viable. And then there’s the addiction treatment-specific issues that always come up such as ‘how do you deal with disruptive clients?’, or ‘what happens when a client has a relapse?’. Answers to these policy questions often reveals a lot about a program’s philosophy.
Conclusion
Explaining how our program has integrated all of its clinical elements in a user-friendly, current, and comprehensive fashion is proving to be more challenging than originally anticipated. In Part II of this series, I will expand on why our program, based on our unique integrated approach to addiction treatment, is particularly challenging to summarize in a clinical brochure.
