Today was my last day of work for the week. So I managed to get some stuff done that needed to get done before I left for the week. I made arrangements for a student schedule change, harassed a teacher to get a behavior inventory back; called the parent from Monday's meeting. It is funny how long ago Monday feels now. It feels really far away.
But for everything I accomplished, more work came my way. I assigned to several new initial referrals. Most of them had me signed on as the school psych but one of them is for a student in my grade so I'm the case manager of record for that one. So, before I left, I also had to get my other coworkers to commit to a date for the initial referral conference. So I can sleep tonight without that hanging over my head.
The interesting bit of conversation that I had today was with my coworker and office mate. We were discussing risk assessments. The part of this conversation that I wanted to talk about was how to make the assignment of risk assessments seem fair.
In any organization, there may be perceptions that some people get all the work while others don't. The people that feel "dumped on" may have this perception. Sometimes all it is is a perception. At other times, there is a bias at the level of distribution for whatever reason. At that level, it may be a perception of whose job it should be or of competence or capriciousness. And sometimes it is just a matter of being in the wrong place at the right time. Or the right place at the wrong time. Or...well you get my meaning and that is also a matter of perception. Some people, like me, love risk assessment (love is too strong of a word, but as I noted yesterday I have been finding them intellectually stimulating recently). Or at least just take it in stride as part of the job. Some folk are uncomfortable with them either because of lack of training or experience or both. Let's face it, being comfortable talking with a complete stranger about whether they have plans to kill themselves or someone else may not necessarily be "normal." And some people may just find the emergent nature of risk assessments disruptive to their daily routine. I'm sure that if you drew a ven diagram of these "factions" there would be a lot of overlap.
So back to the question of making the distribution of risk assessments fair. My first thought was to have a list of all the staff responsible for risk assessments and each time a person completes a risk assessment, they get a check next to their name with the goal of trying to make the check marks even out. Upon further examination of this idea, it has its flaws, such as actually relying on a person to keep such a list. It may also increase the feeling of being dumped on or the feeling that "I do more than you and I have the check marks to prove it."
My coworker brought up a better idea, hearkening back to our days in non-profit behavioral healthcare: the rotating on-call system. Assigning one person to be the primary and one person to be the back-up on-call for the week. I think it is a really good idea because it would free people from having to worry about having their week disrupted because people would know when they are on-call (thanks to a schedule) and could plan accordingly. It also takes the feeling of being dumped on away because everyone gets their time in the barrel and it becomes luck of the draw. On one rotation, you may have none while on another rotation, you may have one every day. Another benefit is response time: there is no wait to assign a staff member to the risk assessment because it is already decided.
This method might not work in all districts. The districts that I can see this being difficult for are the ones where staff is assigned and located in a particular school. This isn't an issue in my district because we all work out of a central office.
Well that is it for today. Tomorrow is conference day. I'll have to remember to bring my camera and take a few pictures. I also have to remember to bring some cash for the raffle. There are several interesting test kits up for raffle. Also I have to get some new pens...hopefully they have ones with black ink...can't stand blue ink...
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