Program Manager / Psychologist
CREAS
Feb 2017 - Jul 2019
Our team was aware that we were not supporting enough users, so we decided to make an exploratory research with our current users to understand them better: what made them look for the service, engage with us, how they felt coming to us in the beginning. To achieve this we did an individual interview with each of our users and we empathised with their struggles.
One of the most important findings was that they felt overwhelmed repeating their stories over and over again. In each institution (hospital, police station, judiciary and CREAS) they were going they had to repeat the violence/abuse they suffered. By the time they were reaching CREAS, they didn't want to talk about their trauma anymore. It was totally understandable and our team could address it as the main pain point. Other concerns that appeared were also related to protect their intimacy, since Garopaba was a small town.
We carried meetings with the interested parts in the institutionss involved (Chief of Police, Judge, Doctors) and presented the findings. We highlighted the high number of domestic violence in the town compared to the low number of users in CREAS. After that, we showed the amount of time every institution was taking to do the same anamnesis interview, which was at least 1 hour long. Finally, we highlighted the stressful impact the process was causing to the victims.
To deal with the pain points we created a solution where women could reach any of the institutions in the order they needed or finded more suitable to them, and that institution would be responsible for creating a report for other involved institutions. With that, the users wouldn't need to repeat themselves and they would have a more humanized treatment. It is an ongoing project that successfully increased the engagement of the victims with CREAS.
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