Allyship In Healthcare (for Versus Virus)

A Safe Space at Work

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Description Allyship is a project we worked on for #TogetherVsVirus in April. It's an online (and in the future an app) to help healthcare workers find and access trauma-informed individual and/or peer support using an online search tool that will also accept user updates. To help make ongoing change, Allyship will also provide information, programs and resources on trauma-informed workplaces and allyship so more people can work towards supporting healthcare workers and creating psychologically safe healthcare workplaces.

This weekend 3 of our team (now up to 10) were focussed on clarifying our vision, mission and strategic planning.

What are the Technologies You Used This Weekend? This weekend we learned about the Continuous Improvement ideas through LeanStack and created a Lean Canvas. We continued documentation in Google Docs and I created a sandbox website to help us see how our information has changed in WordPress. I used Canva to 'pretty up' our Vision and Mission statement to share with our group.

What Challenges Did We Run Into? We have been trying to get our group into a regular meeting time and now that the initial #TogetherVsVirus hackathon is over it's been difficult - as we are up to 10 people now in 4 time zones ranging from Canada's West Coast (GMT-8) to Switzerland (GMT+2). This is one reason we've been struggling to get some clarity.

What Are The Accomplishments You Are Proud Of? I'm proud of us getting some clarity and specifics around our vision and mission. We are using 2 big ideas: Allyship and Trauma-Informed Care. These things are compatible, but we needed to do some real thinking about how we are using and presenting them so that the website makes sense to new users.

Andrea’s ‘Aha Moment’ was realizing ‘How this project is more important as we pluck along .Realization of working on something currently non existing that has a potential to change healthcare culture, attend to health cate workers needs and wellbeing ....translating to saving lives, wellbeing of organizations, employees ,patients , families and communities here and around the world .”

What Have You Learned? I'm very glad to have been introduced to the LeanStack website and tools. We've used Business Model Canvas and it's helpful to have a similar framework with a few key differences. Filling in the Lean Canvas really helped shift some ideas for me.

What are the next steps? We were able to take our information organizing to create a few things that will help us move forward:

  • We have a clear path for creating basic content on the website, so we can start to have group members begin on that.
  • We have more direction to better organize ourselves on the website and redo our UX. I hope we have enough information to help our developer get started.

Relevance for Swiss Ecosystem We are in such early planning phases that we have limited ourselves to using Canadian healthcare mental health statistics, making a huge assumption that things are similar in other jurisdictions. From being in the #MedTwitter space among predominantly US, Canadian and UK medical staff, patients and family caregivers the issues of struggling and difficult workplaces is common in these countries.

Relevance of the Solution Our initial hackathon project addresses the issue by creating an education and support website that would literally put necessary information into the hands of the people affected - both for finding help in the short-term and in effecting change over the long-term (eventually an app - but one thing first). The answer to burnout is to create psychologically safe workplaces - and it will come from workers, patients, family caregivers and the general public better understanding the issues and demanding changes.

With respect to the work we did this weekend, we are hoping that the work we did this weekend will help unblock our group and give us renewed enthusiasm. It is different moving from the excitement of an initial hackathon - where everyone is available all the time - to moving into a more level-headed business structure. With a solution that is basically helping to shift culture, the 'why' is clear, but the 'how' can be very messy. We hope we've done some solid work on it.

Potential for Impact We have to keep reminding ourselves about how potentially powerful it will be to get this tool and the business model right. It has been helpful that the 2 main participants this weekend are those who have experienced significant burnout and PTSD as a result of their involvement in the Canadian healthcare system. Both of us here this weekend have personal experiences and have witnessed other patients/family caregivers and healthcare professionals struggle with stigma prior to COVID. We are reminded in our own stories of how powerful having access to resources and information would have been in our own journeys.

The work we have done this weekend will help us create a better resource and allow the team to move forward past its current organizing roadblocks.

Progress During this Hackathon During this hackathon we reviewed the massive amount of research and articles and thoughts from the first hackathon and spent the time needed to sort this out.

We created a Mission/Vision/Values statement, streamlined the front page of our website using the SEO/content strategy we were then able to develop and were able to see some clear, strategic steps to take to move forward.

It has massive implications for moving ourselves forward and creating a website that will more helpful and less confusing for users.

It has been helpful to be able to work together again in a structured environment with access to new resources and mentors.

Project Added Value Our biggest value added in terms of the project is that we have made a big step in creating a more clear vision for our group - especially for the searchable resource developer who has been needing more clear direction (as have we all).

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