Meet Brooke Toia, Clinical Operations Manager

Meet Brooke Toia, our Clinical Operations Manager based at Lady Lawley Cottage in Cottesloe – our dedicated children and youth hub. 

Brooke has been an occupational therapist for the past seven years, and has been working with Rocky Bay for over two years. At the Cottage she manages a wonderful team of dedicated allied health professionals and is involved in many exciting projects related to both staff and our customers. 

Brooke is also one of the developers of our brand new kindy readiness program, Sprouts! 

Created by our team of experienced allied health professionals, Sprouts provides parents and caregivers with resources, strategies and invaluable guidance to support children aged 3-5 years. The small group setting is based in the comfort of Lady Lawley Cottage. 

Find out more about Brooke and her dynamic role, and her involvement with Sprouts, with our Q&A! 

Describe a typical day in your role 

My role is so varied. I manage an awesome team of physios, speech pathologists and occupational therapists supporting their learning and career goals and managing their performance. 

I am involved in various projects including staff development, risk and safety policies relating to therapy customers, the improvement of process, policies and resources, particularly service improvement or innovation.  

I also still hold a clinical caseload where I see children aged one to 16 years-old for occupational therapy.  

Tell us more about your previous experience? 

I have worked in both private practice and not-for-profit with a paediatric case load, split equally across the disability sector and NDIS, as well as within the foster care system for children who have experienced trauma.  

How did the ‘Sprouts’ program come about, and how does it support our young customers? 

Sprouts is a part of a project developed through our Early Childhood Intervention Steering Committee. It was developed by our Advanced Clinician Physiotherapist Ty Kowalski, Speech Pathologist Clinical Advisor Ashleigh O’Callaghan-Sear and myself with contribution and review from the Committee.  Sprouts was developed as a way to continue to meet our customer’s needs by implementing the best practice principles in early childhood intervention supports.  

We decided to start with a pre-kindy program as we saw a large amount of our customers have difficulty transitioning into kindy – many went from a lot of one-on-one support to huge, noisy classrooms with largely demanding tasks. 

Sprouts provides a small group environment with therapists to support the foundational skills for kindy, whilst also educating parents and carers on how they too can support their skill development and transition into kindy.  

How did your role as Team Leader at Lady Lawley Cottage come about? And what makes the Cottage such a specialised hub for customers? 

I was previously covering leave for the Clinical Operations Manager role at our Duncraig hub and really enjoyed it. The same role at LLC came up toward the end of this position, so I applied and was successful. I really wanted to embrace this opportunity as my whole career was in paediatrics and this was Rocky Bay’s first paediatric hub.  

It has also been a great learning experience to use my clinical knowledge to support the set up and re-design of the hub to best meet clinical needs, and hopefully in the future provide services which previously we couldn’t due to environmental restrictions.  

What do you love most about your role? 

I love working with our team, they are so inspiring, passionate and just a good bunch of people. Each person has their own strengths and unique qualities which makes for such as strong team.  

I also love being involved in service improvement projects such as Sprouts and the Early Childhood Intervention Steering Committee. To be able to be part of such exciting and innovative projects which really support services for our customers is so rewarding and fulfilling.  

What are three things you can’t live without and why? 

1. Puzzles. It’s a good way to unwind and get a micro hit of dopamine each time I fit a piece  

2. A beach close by. I just love it  

3. My puppy, because she is so cute and makes everything ok  

Click below to find out more about our brand new kindy readiness program, Sprouts. 

Sprouts – Kindy Readiness Program