✨ Diversion: tips & tricks

As the Diversion module is relatively new (4.0.60, October 2023), a consensus about the best usage of this module has yet to be developed. Therefore, you are a pioneer! Go experiment.

Module Development

The Diversion module was designed in large part by ACRE Consulting. A whole lot of communities across Canada were consulted and a proposal for a new Diversion module was developed in 2021. We are happy to say that most of our recommendations were implemented as we described, but there are certainly some areas where our vision was not completely captured. To the extent that the current module does not match our proposal, we are working on understanding the differences and exploring ways to narrow that gap.

For example:

• We proposed that the Diversion module should automatically calculate whether the Diversion effort was successful or not, based on whether a client subsequently is admitted to a shelter within a particular timeframe. It's currently a manual selection, with confusing options.
• We also don't like the look of the Diversion one-pager. It's too cluttered. Our original proposal envisioned that that page be quick, clean, and easy-to-use, but the development team embedded a lot of information from other modules within it. It remains to be seen which approach makes more sense.

Interested in reading our whole proposal? Here it is:

HIFIS Improvement Project: Diversion Report

Shelter Staff

We suspect that it's best if you grant access to the Diversion module for all front line shelter staff, even if they aren't currently doing diversion. Why? First of all, it may help to normalize the concept that shelter staff should be attempting to divert clients away from shelter before admitting them.

If you're just implementing a diversion program at shelters, or it isn't well established, we recommend granting staff access to the workflow method and not the one-page method, to teach good habits and also to ensure consistency while you're trying something new. Once you've got your deiversion program more established, you can explore the one-page version.

Prevention & Diversion

In many communities, they have something called a "Prevention & Diversion" program. In HIFIS, there's a Housing Loss Prevention Module which exists to record what sorts of financial assistance were issued to assist people remain in their current housing, and there's also the new Diversion module, which doesn't directly let you track financial assistance, nor is it attached to a client's current housing.

We suspect that staff that deliver a combined prevention/diversion program may struggle with determining which module to use in which circumstances. For example, if you instruct staff to only do Housing Loss Prevention when the client is remaining at their current address, and do Diversion at other times, would result in messy data. Half of the time you're recording data one way and half the time you're recording data another way. It's inconsistent, and that should generally be avoided.

This is an area where we are still working out what works best in practice.

One option that you could consider: while doing a Diversion record, there's a link to the Housing Loss Prevention module. You could instruct staff to create a Diversion record every time, and in certain circumstances, also create a linked Housing Loss Prevention record.