Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your primary role at Holland Bloorview?

I am a health professional leader with 24+ years of experience advocating for community health, and client and family programs focused on unity, health literacy, and inclusion for under-serviced populations.  As manager, inclusion, diversity, equity, accessibility, and anti-racism at Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital, I am responsible for the development of authentic and responsive strategies to promote a healthy and equitable workplace.

How did you end up working at Holland Bloorview and what keeps you inspired to continue working at HB?

When I started working at Holland Bloorview twenty-two years ago, I originally worked in therapeutic recreation where I coordinated programming in multi-sensory environments (MSEs) or Snoezelen rooms. Later, as a family support specialist in the client and family integrated care team I provided education and resources to families across the pediatric lifespan. I was Holland Bloorview’s health literacy lead for over a decade and developed an organizational framework to create accessible plain language documents for clients and families via trained family and youth reviewers sourced through the hospital’s family leadership program.  This led to being on the planning committee for the first health literacy symposium (2017) co-sponsored by the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care, the University Health Network and the Canadian Health Literacy Patient Engagement Network. 

From the very beginning, I applied a diversity, equity, and inclusion lens.  In all three roles, my work opened up the conversation around how we talk with and engage families and clients, and the importance of providing health information in a way that is accessible to all.

Understanding cultural context within personal and professional relationships and how one expresses oneself, has always fascinated me. One of my identities is as a hard-of-hearing/deaf person, so there is the aspect of communication from a sensory perspective and the framing of disability and ableism in healthcare and healthcare leadership.   I’m originally from Trinidad, so had the immigrant experience of being a racialized woman navigating the healthcare space.  

The IDEAA role allows me to integrate all those professional experiences towards creating a holistic and compassionate lens that will enable a healthy team and support the evolution of socially accountable care, as outlined in our strategic plan HB2030.

As the manager of the IDEAA office, what does a typical day look like for you?

On a given day I can wear many different hats. In many instances, IDEAA work requires a change management strategy. This necessitates a 360 degree approach to understanding how the actions we take affect all groups, given that IDEAA work by subject matter can also be emotional.

For example, I could be providing consultation about a new program, having a one-on-one dialogue with a colleague, charing meetings for the three sub-committee meetings for the IDEAA task force which include education, data action and accessibility, participating in meetings with external system partners where we’re actively collaborating and sharing information on how to create a more equitable healthcare experience for all.   Some specific tasks within my portfolio include:

• Co-creating and/or updating policies and procedures that advance equity, belonging and anti-oppression at all levels of the organization such as the new Workplace Accommodation Policy and a revised Emergency Response Planning for employees with disabilities (April 2023) and the Smudging Policy (February 2024).
• Representing Holland Bloorview at local and regional health system planning tables including Kids Health Alliance Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Community of Practice, BlackNorth Initiative, Toronto Academic Health Sciences Network Anti-Racism committee, and the Temerty School of Medicine Diversity Advisory Council (DiVAC) at the University of Toronto
• Producing literature reviews and needs assessments, presentations, briefing notes, and other written materials as needed by the board, senior management team, new staff orientations, family and youth leaders.
• Providing individual and team-based consults to support IDEAA knowledge and capacity building as a reliable subject matter expert, liaison, and facilitator around social, racial and disability justice issues.
• Hiring, performance coaching, workload management, and delegation for IDEAA office staff. 

In what ways have you seen the IDEAA office evolve since you began your role?

When I started my role in July 2022, anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism were identified by Ontario Health as two populations requiring a specialized focus.  We’ve also come to better understand that some groups are racialized based on intersecting factors such as religion, caste, or citizenship; and groups that might not be immediately identified in the IDEAA space are also subject to both faith-based and racialized discrimination. For added context, when the IDEAA office was first established seven years ago, it was called Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). Over the years, we acknowledged that intersectionality needed to automatically be part of the conversation, so we integrated disability inclusion and anti-racism into the title.   

What are some of the IDEAA office responsibilities? 

The priorities as identified by the organization are focused on five areas:

1. Staff education: Level-up internal knowledge, skills and capacity related to IDEAA through anti-racism education
2. Employee well-being: Invest in employee wellness, belonging, and psychological safety through amplification of our discrimination, racism and harassment reporting process, employee resource groups, using socio-demographic data to create actions to align staff representation to the communities we serve and access to workplace mobility.
3. Promote a social accountability lens:  Apply IDEAA principles for inclusive service design through team consultation and IDEAA office representation on hospital committees.
4. Implement and utilize data collection:  Identifying underserved client and family populations with better precision through our social needs screening and client and family sociodemographic survey. 
5. Strengthen system partnerships:  Ongoing partnership and best practices sharing with healthcare system partners and community groups, with a focus on health equity, Indigenous health and anti-Black racism.

The IDEAA office has been privileged to work with many like-minded system partners over the past two years including:

• Assembly of First Nations policy planners, with the intention of better understanding the integration of Indigenous worldviews in healthcare including accessibility and childhood disability and how we can better serve these populations.
• Source IDEAA-based education and support for staff through dialogue with community partners such as UJA Toronto and Muslim Advisory Council of Canada.
• Advancing consideration for Black health, including childhood disability through Ontario Health’s Black Health Plan Working Group.  
• Be part of a collaborative cross-section of community health organizations to input on a proposed health equity framework by Healthcare Excellence Canada.
• Session planning in regard to Children’s Healthcare Canada’s learning series on Child Health Equity.

Can you discuss any upcoming projects or goals for the IDEAA office in the near future?

We want to ensure that all equity-seeking groups at our hospital see themselves in our IDEAA priorities, which include continued engagement around the Roadmap to confront anti-Black racism at Holland Bloorview,  integration of the two-eyed seeing model for Indigenous families and clients, and supporting the development of current and new employee resource groups, including the LGBTQ2S+, Jewish and Black employee groups.

What is your vision for the future of the IDEAA office, and how do you see its role evolving within Holland Bloorview and the broader community?

Over the years, there has been increasing diversity of Holland Bloorview families, which includes newcomers, many from areas that have experienced conflict. There is an opportunity to intentionally and strategically expand IDEAA principles even further to incorporate a broader understanding of providing trauma-informed care to provide a more holistic and mindful model of care for our families and clients.

Is there anything else you would like to share about yourself and the work of the IDEAA office?

This work is about confronting personal biases and upending the knowledge you might have as a healthcare professional.  As a teaching hospital, we owe it to ourselves and our employees and for the sake of our families and clients, to prioritize this type of learning and to make it easily available. A wise colleague said “culture is health”. I envision the IDEAA office as enabling those components to support the creation of an inclusive healthcare culture. In-house, this can look like many things, whether it be one-on-one meetings with employees to identify opportunities for better support for staff and families; team collaboration to identify health equity initiatives that could be actioned by departments, or providing all staff with equitable access to IDEAA-based learning.