sozobe wrote:Dlowan's situation might be different as it sounds much busier, but aside from pure funding problems, part of the problem with all of this is that it's often so unpredictable. At my center, I'd have periods of relative calm (where the people I already had on staff were humming along, slightly to the bored end of the spectrum) and then all of a sudden everything would come crashing down at once and I'd have one of those days from hell that dlowan described.
Yeppers...
Apparently, the craziness I describe used to be a very rare event.
Now, it is the norm. This has apparently been so over the last couple of years.
It reflects the reality, I think, of most key human services, at least in my country....that the number of difficult situations encountered has grown exponentially, and that the client group seen is increasingly chaotic and dysfunctional, and that their difficulties are increasingly complex and overwhelming.
The kids taken into care are far more damaged by the time they get there, and therefore harder and harder for carers to manage...and in my state, the care system, never great, has been carefully fragmented by successive governments between a plethora of private agencies, (because of their dislike of the public sector), so good carers are very hard to recruit and keep, at the same time as we ask them to help kids whose behaviour renders them almost unbearable.
This at a time when our understanding of the devastating effects of poor attachment, neglect and emotional abuse (never mind physical and sexual, whose effects we have known about for a relatively longer time) is far deeper and fuller than at any time before.
A little bit more money has recently come nto the system, AGAIN mostly carefully trickled to many different, mainly charity based, agencies...who are starting from scratch, with staff newly recruited and with a far lesser skill base than those in the established government agencies, whom we in those agencies are then asked to help train so they can scramble themselves into competency (of course, they DO have some good, competent staff already, but precious ******* few, as far as my experience has gone!) only to see them fumble with these terribly difficult families, who require enormous skill to assess and work with.
The families then often, after a brief diversion, get funneled back into the agencies they would have gone to anyway, who have had almost no new resourcing. Grrrrrrrrrrr.......
Blimey.
More whinging! Sorry.
It makes me want to bite, though.
The good thing, I think, is that the government is beginning to look at early intervention via infant mental health.
Initially, they funded something that could begin to identify, but not assist with, the need.
As far as I can see, the weight of overwhelming reality is gradually dawning, and the ability to intervene is gradually trickling into the agency most involved with that process. Very gradually...so far they are moving more therapy staff in, but with a model mainly of supporting nurses to do the work.
That'll work with the easy to medium stuff, but for the high risk stuff you need VERY skilled therapists.
Lol! The government, as they do, initially thought that a nice visit from a nice nurse would suffice. As it would, in a nice happy family. They are slowly discovering what is really out there in high risk family land, because they armed their nice nurses with a detailed assessment instrument, which, if the families didn't throw out the nice nurse for asking searching, probing questions, revealed just how scary the prognosis was for a lot of those poor babies.
