Who is the Glen Centre?
The Glen Centre is a residential drug and alcohol rehabilitation service operating on the Central Coast of New South Wales (NSW). With two facilities—one for men established in 1994 and another for women launched in 2022. The centre provides vital support to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals from across Australia. Their mission is to offer a culturally safe and inclusive environment that helps people overcome addiction and rebuild their lives.
Collaboration with GDI
The Glen Centre partnered with Good Data Institute (GDI) to address a critical need: improving transparency and reporting for their stakeholders, which clients, staff, management, community and funders. The primary goal of this collaboration was to create an interactive Key Performance Indicator (KPI) dashboard that would streamline reporting and highlight The Glen’s social impact. This was especially important given the challenges smaller rehabilitation facilities face in managing the diverse reporting requirements imposed by various funders.
The GDI team on this partnership consisted of Dougal Hanson, Jason Lee and Kane Lo.
The Project
As a project team we develop two Power BI dashboards and the centralised data model focused on tracking and reporting essential KPIs. The dashboard will cover three of the sixteen standardised KPIs established by the Network of Alcohol and other Drugs Agencies (NADA), with the potential to expand to more KPIs as a stretch goal.
Quality of Life (QoL): Measures improvements in the quality of life for individuals
undergoing rehabilitation.
Kessler Psychological Distress Scale-10 (K10) (a psychological distress scale): a scale that measures non-specific psychological distress.
Existing Capacity: Tracks the current capacity of The Glen’s facilities, ensuring optimal resource utilisation.
The data feeding into the dashboard will come from The Glen’s Clinical Management System, Mimaso and hybrid automation that feeds into a PowerBI star schema data model - to help to ensure the model is sustainable where additional data puzzle pieces can be added to it for the future.
The first dashboard that was created and made available can be viewed from the Glen Centre website (https://www.theglencentre.org.au/the-glen-publications-and-data/).
The final dashboard that was created is for internal purposed and was made to allow the for teams to deep dive into what drives each of these KPIs - helping to be more specific in their action areas.
Visiting The Glen Centre
One particularly special part about this project was being able to visit the Glen Centre in person. In the data world, often times it can be easy to forget about the real people behind the numbers so being able to meet the Glen team face-to-face was very special. Both myself and Kane were able to make separate trips over to the Central Coast of NSW to see the team.
For myself, visiting The Glen was an experience that truly brought the significance of our work into focus. Meeting the team and seeing firsthand the impact they have on the community was both humbling and inspiring. The Glen’s integration with traditional Indigenous practices is evident in everything they do, and it was amazing to connect with people who are so deeply committed to the centre's mission. What a charity. Despite having a skeleton crew, they provide such a crucial role, and I’m so glad that we’re able to support them in any way. They even gave me an end-to-end view, letting me sit in on an admission with a client.
Coming from a corporate environment, it was refreshing to step into a space where the focus is on people and mental health - as opposed to just sales and $ growth. The conversations were about real-life challenges and the meaningful work being done to address them. This visit gave me a new perspective on the importance of what we’re contributing to.
One of the highlights was having lunch with both the case workers and residents. Sharing a meal allowed us to connect on a personal level, breaking down the usual barriers between 'staff' and 'client.' Even though I didn’t get to visit both centres, the time spent there was truly enriching. It’s not every day that you get to see the direct impact of your work, and this visit really brought that home for me.
By Jason Lee (GDI Volunteer)
About GDI:
The Good Data Institute (established 2019) is a registered not-for-profit organisation (ABN: 6664087941) that aims to give not-for-profits access to data analytics (D&A) support & tools. Our mission is to be the bridge between the not-for-profit world and the world of data analytics practitioners wishing to do social good. Using D&A, we identify, share, and help implement the most effective means for growing NFP people, organisations, and their impact.
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