Supporting Data Collection in Mental Health Programs

Let’s face it: consistently and accurately documenting mental health services and outcome data is not the main motivation underneath most CAC staff members’ dedication to their work. Data collection and reporting can feel secondary to CAC mental health programs’ core mission of helping kids heal, and it can be hard for CAC employees to carve out the time required to carefully document client information, service outputs, and assessment results.

And yet, strong data collection can not only document the work of mental health programs, it can also answer important questions about who is being served and how effectively, can boost staff morale through positive feedback, and can bolster a center’s case for additional funding and resources.

So how can CAC-based mental health programs prioritize meeting kids’ needs while also documenting the outcomes of their work?  In 2024, NCA launched the Improving Mental Health Data Pilot, a project aimed at understanding how CACs collect mental health services information and what kinds of barriers to consistent, accurate data collection they encounter. Pilot CAC sites agreed to systematically document mental health referral, therapy uptake, appointment attendance, and assessment results for 15 months, while tracking the challenges and successes they experienced along the way.

What did we learn?  To be sure, participating CACs noted that consistent data collection was not an easy task, and pointed to challenges like staff turnover, a lack of time, and different understandings of the same data point across staff. At the same time, results from the pilot project show that these CACs developed several successful strategies for enhancing data collection.  These included:

-Building investment by sharing results from data with staff and engaging their wisdom about what the findings mean to their work.
-Enlisting staff input to identify creative strategies for improving data collection and for developing shared data definitions.
-Incentivizing data collection by including it in employee performance goals, in supervision meetings, and by recognizing and celebrating data collection successes.
-Recognizing the time commitment involved in data collection, and protecting time for it, through strategies such as “data hours” or even “data days” when staff calendars are cleared for ensuring complete documentation.
-Identifying a “data champion” – someone on the mental health team with infectious enthusiasm about what can be learned from data.
-Creating and recording evergreen, on-demand training resources regarding data collection for new staff.

The enhanced focus on data collection allowed pilot sites to better track crucial information such as gaps between referral for and actual uptake of mental health services, wait times, completion rates, and how youth with problematic sexual behaviors were faring in the mental health services pipeline.

CACs in this project reframed data collection as an integrated, key component of service provision, and as a systematic part of everyday business. For more information about strategies for enhancing data collection, and the learnings from this project, you can access the report here.