EA - Vida Plena's 2023 Impact Report: Measuring Progress and Looking Ahead by Vida Plena

The Nonlinear Library

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Vida Plena's 2023 Impact Report: Measuring Progress and Looking Ahead, published by Vida Plena on July 23, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
We from Vida Plena are proud to present our first
Annual Impact Report.
2023 was our first full year. It was a year of learning. We had just finished a
successful pilot and started the year with the mission of building a solid foundation and proving that our therapy model works at scale.
This first annual impact report is our attempt to capture through charts and graphs bits of crucial evidence about who we've helped in 2023 and where we can continue to improve.
Background Context
Vida Plena (meaning 'a flourishing life' in Spanish) is a nonprofit organization based in Quito, Ecuador which launched in 2022 (see our launch post here).
Our mission is to build strong mental health in low-income and refugee communities, who otherwise would have no access to care. We provide evidence-based depression treatment using group interpersonal therapy, which is highly cost-effective and scalable.
Main Findings
Our main findings during the process of creating this report were:
In 2023, we screened 882 people for depression. 434 (49%) of these became participants, taking at least 1 group session.
Program participants had an average reduction of 6.6 in the PHQ-9 questionnaire. 68% of participants with moderate to severe depression clinically improved (5 points drop in PHQ-9). Five points are considered to be a clinically significant improvement.
We also saw reductions in secondary indicators of self-harm thoughts and suicidal ideation, anxiety, psychosocial functioning, and employment. Participants who fill out our end-line survey also report high satisfaction with the program and increased feelings of hope and purpose.
90% of participants came from vulnerable groups, the most common of which were people experiencing food insecurity (56%), female heads of households (34%), and migrants and refugees (22%).
Participant recovery seems to be related mostly to the baseline level of depression and not so much to the number of sessions taken or other variables like the modality of the sessions (virtual or in person).
Challenges
While we are excited with these results, there are many challenges and areas we still feel we need to improve. In particular:
Even though 5 points is considered to be a clinically significant change on the PHQ-9 scale, the 6.6-point drop is still below our more ambitious target. In 2024, we aim to improve this margin to nine points across participants entering with moderate to severe depression.
Relatedly, we aim to improve our participant retention rate. Our initial findings suggest that participants may drop out when they start feeling better. We believe there is room for them to continue improving and learning important skills to enhance their resilience and strengthen their support network if they attend more therapy sessions.
Limitations
We are also aware that this first report has limitations.
First, we rely basically on pre-post participant comparisons, with no randomized control group. We try to partially compensate for this fact by considering spontaneous remission data from the scientific literature. However, our priority in the coming years is to implement control groups where people who are not involved in Vida Plena g-IPT sessions take PHQ-9 assessments over eight weeks to determine our population's spontaneous remission rates.
Secondly, some of the data we collect is likely subject to multiple biases. For example, the program satisfaction data we have, as well as many secondary indicators, come from people who take the end-line survey by the end of their 8th group session. People who get so far into the program without dropping out are likely the ones who saw the most value in it, and this can skew our conclus...