Head Injury Rehabilitation Ontario
Head Injury Rehabilitation Ontario (HIRO) is a not-for-profit healthcare agency that provides rehabilitation services for individuals who have sustained a traumatic brain injury (TBI), also known as an acquired brain injury (ABI).
In mid-2020, we helped HIRO quickly create a pandemic strategy to ensure the safety of clients and families, protect the physical and mental health of their frontline workers, and act as a model to help other healthcare organizations manage through the pandemic.
The client
The goal of HIRO is to help individuals with ABIs regain as much independence as possible and improve their quality of life. Services provided by HIRO include physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and psychological counseling.
They operate residential care homes, transitional living apartments, community services, and outreach for homeless individuals. HIRO also offers support for families of individuals with an ABI.
For over 30 years, HIRO has worked with brain injury survivors and their families to address the challenges they face with dignity and respect. HIRO is unique in its ability to provide evidence-based, client and family centered rehabilitation care in the community. HIRO staff work with clients and their families to achieve goals that are meaningful for them throughout the full continuum of care.
Each rehabilitation program is tailored to fit the needs of the client and supported by a network of clinical professionals, care workers, family, friends and community advocates who help facilitate transitions toward greater independence. HIRO’s goal is to help clients realize their full and unique potential. Their motto is “We are a promise of hope after ABI.”
HIRO clients in residential home working with arts and crafts
The challenge
Like other healthcare organizations in 2020, HIRO struggled to adapt to a “new normal” that was anything but normal. Dedicated staff worked hard to say safe and keep their clients safe, a challenge made more difficult by the nature of their injuries. For example, staff had to remind clients with amnesia every single day that there was a pandemic, and that’s why everyone was wearing a mask – and why they could not just go to the coffee shop like they used to.
In the spring of 2020, Ontario government authorities had just announced the first of what would become a long series of “restart” phases, punctuated by just as many lockdowns. This constant stop-start cycle was burning out staff, not to mention clients and their families. And there was no end in sight, since at this point there was no COVID-19 vaccine even on the horizon.
HIRO CEO Mila Ray-Daniels and her board of directors were trying to make sense of a volatile, uncertain, and complex situation. They needed a “playbook” to handle not just the impending “restart” phase but to prepare for any COVID-19 scenario, including the unlikely event that no COVID-19 vaccine was forthcoming.
The solution
The approach organizations often take to develop strategy is for the leadership team (sometimes accompanied by the board) to go on a retreat and develop a strategy in isolation. And indeed this option of a board retreat was initially considered. But Ray-Daniels knew from experience the importance of assembling a cross-functional team, including staff, to create HIRO’s pandemic strategy.
Early on in the pandemic, her executive team issued a rule that staff needed to wear freshly laundered clothes to work each day. They did not realize that many staff lacked laundry facilities in their apartments, so complying with this new rule meant they needed to got to a laundromat, which raised the risk of COVID-19 infection, and defeated the whole purpose of the clean-clothes plan. In the end, Ray-Daniels opted for the collaborative approach.
Mind Meeting Group projects are typically 10 weeks in length but this situation was especially urgent. So in just 4 weeks, we helped Ray-Daniels frame her organization’s challenge and subdivide it into four scenarios ranging from best-case to worst case, plus a “black swan” scenario to anticipate so-called “unknown unknowns.”
We organized an online solving workshop where a diverse set of staff, board members, and other stakeholders analyzed the challenge, explored a range of solutions, and agreed on a comprehensive strategy. And we provided MURAL and Zoom training before the workshop to ensure all participants were comfortable using online collaboration tools.
Despite the complexity of the challenge and the diversity of stakeholders, the strategy emerging from the workshop enjoyed virtually unanimous support, giving HIRO significant momentum for implementation. (To protect client confidentiality, we do not share any strategy details).
Testimonial
