a brand new understanding of your fellow man, loads of us are aware that there are some mental health nursing jobs that will provide you with not only job skills and experience. For information about, if you haven’t met the. In mental health residential environments amongst the most difficult things is keeping the clients engaged with the programming and their challenging behaviors to a minimum.
Problems that affected the normal functioning of our program as a whole.
Accordingly the efficiency and effectiveness of these systems will dictate how successful that program going to be. Every unit of every organization has a behavioral support system in place to achieve this objective. Such data is important to track behavioral progress or regression. Besides, the other purpose of the system is to function as a motivational tool. So, depending on the concept of climbing up a ladder to reach discharge, prosocial behaviors move the client up the ladder and misconduct moves the client down the ladder.
Privileges increase as the client moves from redish, to dark yellow, to orange to greenish.
In the unit where I work, we utilize a system to record behavioral frequencies.
It provides us with data on the behaviors type that are occurring as well as how often these behaviors are occurring. Some amount of time ago, we realized that the motivational factor wasn’t being strong enough and that the Point Level System wasn’t helping improving those skills that were meant to be fostered. Doesn’t it sound familiar? That’s when Perry Alleman, the Lead Counselor of the unit during that time suggested the idea of a Token System which could support the Point Level System. I felt it was something worth trying. Make sure you write suggestions about it. Perry moved on to another program shortly after but I didn’t let go his idea of a Token System. I started working with my team to develop such system.
Other units of the program was using similar systems, directly tied to their respective Point Level Systems.
While still supporting it, we wanted to keep it from overlapping with the Point Level System.
Our project differed from their approach in one point. We started to assess all of our clients’ performances with intention to detect improvement needs and ways to reinforce those skills where they’ve been lagging. Major challenge, since the diversity of our unit’s population, was to conceive a system that going to be applied to everyone but without losing an individualized approach. We also needed a system simple enough for the clients and staff to understand/manage and at identical time. Consider that quite a few our teenage clients have oppositional/defiant disorders so finding something that pleases everyone is sometimes a daunting task. Although, emma Finn, Martin Carbonell and Steve Wigmore, Direct Support Professionals of the unit started detecting every client’s needs and so, we started putting our ideas together. Whenever outstanding room care, timely bedtime, etcetera Note that, not nearly any category should apply to almost any client, we tied their residential goals and Behavior Support Plans and came up with a set of goals like completion of hygiene routine.
For every goal, a certain percentage of kens must be awarded after daily/weekly/monthly completion, and those kens should be traded at first pace of the week for toys, hygiene products, CD Players, you have to remeber that books and similar stuff in line with the clients’ preferences. They’ve been discharged from the program. We wanted to teach the clients how to administrate their money and build a savings discipline. I mean, give real world context to the system. He would get a bonus credited to his account, So in case a client decided to save their tokens. With intention to achieve this a small tweak was suggested by Steve. Then the clients were surprisingly engaged with it and savers were the highest functioning clients. Couldn’t refrain from spending, they will still express their desire for the most expensive ones. While others became spenders, Now look, the spenders traded their kens since they got enough to buy most of the cheapest items. That said, down the road, we should like to add a lending system, where the clients could borrow kens and deadlines to pay for them.
We created the system the way that could have been easily tailored conforming to individual needs, and fast.
Trust me, the extra daily paperwork after the night, pays with gains in behavioral improvements on the clients’ side, and relieving work stress levels on ours’.
That said, this has also helped new staff get quickly up to speed at learning the system being that their demands and amount of engagement. Needless to say, the clients are so into it that they have put pressure on us to stay on our toes. Have you heard about something like this before? Far the results have exceeded our expectations. Fernando Tarnogol is a Argentinean psychologist, currently working as Program Coordinator at the Devereux Foundation in West Chester. His professional experience includes work in HR for HSBC Bank Argentina and in two mental health facilities performing psychological evaluations and similar clinical work.