Dayna said she wanted to know more about my job, so I thought I'd post it on here so everyone can see. Due to confidentiality stuff, I can't tell you much about my actual cases, but I can give you a general idea of what I do.
Every day is different, and I've been told several times by several different people that I managed to get hired at one of the hardest times of the year because of all the short weeks (from the holidays and whatnot), so I haven't been able to get into any sort of groove yet. Once I get into a groove, I'm sure I'll feel a bit more under control... but for now, I'm looking at it in a positive way by saying, I'm doing the hard first, so when it's easier, I'll really be under control!
Lately my days have been going from about 830 am to around 6 pm or so... depending on when my last scheduled session is. Today however, I got home at 5 pm because none of my families were answering their phones or calling me back! There's not much we can do when that happens, so I got caught up on my paperwork, got a bit more training from a few people on a few things, and headed home, since I have a feeling tomorrow will be busy seeing people!
I now have 4 cases, which is a full caseload (4-6 is, but they're being nice right now of course!), and we are required to see every family at least 3 times a week for hour long sessions. Then we have to write the family therapy note for each session, stating what we got accomplished and that sort of stuff. If it's not documented, it didn't happen... that's a HUGE motto around the office, so it's important to not forget to document things! A lot of this job is documentation, which doesn't really bother me as much as it bothers other people. Some days I'd almost rather be documenting things on the computer all day long instead of talking to people, but I don't get that choice. ;) We also stay in VERY close contact with the client's school, and probation officer if they have one. Usually Youth Villages is the last resort before a child is taken out of the home and put into DCS custody, or put in a group home or higher level of supervision, so we get the worst of the worst sometimes, but that just makes it a good challenge. Many of the things we do are with the parent, working on their parenting skills and teaching them how to implement rules, rewards, and consequences, and how to be consistent in doing so. We also help the kids learn how to handle their anger in different ways instead of just being verbally or physically aggressive... which can be a challenge! I had a kid almost curse me out the other day because I told his guardian to use the computer as a consequence if he doesn't do well in school... he wasn't happy about that, but I bet if she's consistent in keeping him off the computer, he'll start doing better at school!! Sometimes it's simple things like that that we take for granted, but that most of these families have never thought of because they were never taught proper parenting skills... they try to be the child's friend instead of parent, so we're there to correct that. We teach a lot of problem solving skills too... like "what could you have done differently in that situation" or "how could you have handled that differently", making them come up with alternatives to their actions, instead of just us telling them what to do and say.
But that's really all our job is about... we just had a new training today about a new technology that Youth Villages is piloting at the Nashville office. It's voice recording/voice recognition software, so we get a headset and digital voice recorder(the Olympus WS-110 if you want to look it up), and then we have software on our computers that will transcribe what we dictate. It takes a bit of time to learn how to do it, and to train your software to recognize you and the way you talk, but once you have it trained, it cuts your paperwork time in half at least, so I'm trying my hardest to learn it! It's pretty neat... it just sounds funny when you are talking into it because you have to say your punctuation, so if I wanted to say "Hello, this is Rachel.", I would have to say "hello cap that comma this is rachel cap that period". Sounds weird, doesn't it?! But once you train it for awhile by going into your computer and editing words and phrases, it remembers things, so you start not having to say "cap that" to capitalize things, and you don't always have to say periods and commas... but other punctuation like semicolons, colons, and question marks you still have to say. It should be interesting, but I'm excited to learn it to lower my documentation time! If you have the headset plugged into the computer, you can also use the software to dictate into ANY document, so I could dictate into MS Word, I can check my email, or do anything with it really. If you are really good at using it, you should be able to take away your keyboard and mouse and JUST use the voice recognition software to do everything. I doubt I will get that great at it, but I will at least be able to do my notes while I'm on the road! Like I said, they are piloting it in the Nashville office, so if we use it enough, the rest of YV (all of the states and the rest of TN) will be able to get it too... and YV is paying for it... no grants from anyone for it, but I think it's a good investment.
So that's my job in a nutshell, plus a few other soapboxes. I know it's kind of scattered, but my job is kind of scattered too!! Sorry no pictures... I don't take pictures at work! ;)
