Certified Trainers Blog

 Posts Tagged ‘Certified Trainers’

Lorelei discusses quality assurance techniques! Very cool indeed!

Check it out! This is the latest in our series….

Allison

Testing. Testing. Is this thing on.

I am new to the great big sea of information that is Therap. I have been swimming in it for about a year and have come to realize a few things. First, the deeper into Therap one goes the more amazing it is. Second is that fact that once you step into the Therap waters you are carried swiftly (and gladly) into those deeper waters. And finally I have learned that no matter how deep you get there is always a friendly Therapite to guide you.

Until next time this is Craig, from the blue waters of the Pacific Northwest, signing off… Wait is this thing still on.

Heather Thornton is the Program Coordinator for Carmel Community Living Corporation (CCLC) in Boulder, Colorado. She is tenacious! It only took us about three months to finally get together! Heather is an Oklahoma transplant (though you could never tell by her accent!) and has lived outside of Denver for around two years. She handles all of her agency’s training and provider administration. She reports that CCLC is using just about everything except billing (but most likely not for long!). Heather is the second trainer from Colorado, joining Linda Medina as a representative of the Rocky Mountain state.

And she is a Therap queen…like someone else I know (Renee!!!).

Allison

We have a handful of new certified trainers to introduce…They will soon learn the secret handshake! There are several more but they are not official until I get a photo…they must prove their existence before they show up here.

Beverly Eschbach is the SECOND Beverly (our Beverlies are the best!) on the trainers’ gang. She is the Quality Management Coordinator for The Arc of Somerset. She knows tons about individual supports and has been one of their provider administrators since 2009. They are also tinkering with the Training Management System, Personal Finance and getting the MAR on board. She sounds super busy…AND SHE IS THE FIRST NEW JERSEY-AN to be a super Therap nerd. It’s like being an astronaut when you’re first at something…all new territory. One small step for Beverly, but one giant step for Therapkind.

Kristy Dominy is another first! She is from The Jessamine Place in Fitzgerald, Georgia, and is THE FIRST GEORGIAN to join the secret trainerhood. Kristy is their quality assurance nerd so you know she knows what’s up…and it sounds like Jessamine is using EVERYTHING they can find in Therap, including running the pilot for billing in the state of Georgia. She is as busy as Beverly!

David Van Hook is the IT Technician for Living Opportunities in Medford, Oregon. He has been with them for several years and was working as a support person before moving into the IT position. David actually has spent most of his time in the field of technology; Living Opportunities was his first experience in human services. He is presently becoming their central provider administrator, as well as trainer. Right now, he is figuring out the Training Management System…

More to come when they cough up some pictures.

Allison

Allison recently sent a gentle reminder that I have not yet posted a blog on the Certified Trainers’ Blog site. While I was well aware of my writer’s block, I greatly appreciate Allison’s nudge. Thanks!

Each of us, I am certain, feels that our job pulls us in many different directions and that our own situation must be unique and there can be nobody else who experiences the sudden and inexplicable transitions from one task to another on a daily basis. Well, I am here to tell you, if this is how you feel about most of your days, you are not alone. Not by any measure.

Typical day in the work life of Michelle Steele (over the past 4 months)

Who am I kidding? There is nothing “typical” about any of my days! Except for the randomness, the most consistent part of any of my days is my redundant referral to my calendar to remind myself of what I was SUPPOSED to be doing today! Let’s see if I can summarize what would be typical…

Arrival to work is hit or miss – dependent upon whether my son is self-managing, I overslept, the hot water heater is functioning, the train is impeding my path of travel and, of course, the functioning focus (or lack thereof) of my fellow commuters! Some days I can arrive right on time… some days, not so much! But I do (mostly) keep it within the navigational beacons of acceptance and my supervisor is quite understanding, particularly because of our recent move to a new home and all the unexpected obstacles that can impact the daily routine of preparation.

So, once I get to my desk and am focusing on getting focused… the priority is dealing with whatever is left from the previous day, usually waiting in my Outlook Inbox for completion before moving it to its appropriate storage folder (it’s a process!) From Therap requests and message notifications to requests for Training Registration to responses to my requests for payment of training classes from outside agencies to questions regarding standard operating procedures for trainers from distant locations to follow to Time Tracking inquiries to scanned copies of receipts for clients for whom I handle finances as the Representative Payee agent. Whew! I’m getting a little worn out reviewing what I dealt with just this morning! Maybe I should re-evaluate my self-imposed two-cups-of-coffee-per-day limit!

By the time my two cups have been long consumed and the now short stretch to the lunch break is rapidly approaching, I remember that I still need to work on that Therap Blog before Allison “gets fussy” with me. *sigh* What was on my calendar, anyway? Oh, yeah! I’m supposed to be processing training rosters from the other training locations! Dang! I wanted to get those American Red Cross certifications submitted first thing! (coworker): “Are you eating lunch with us in the lunch room today?” (me): “I wish. I need to get these certs submitted. Maybe tomorrow, thanks for asking!” Okay, switch focus for the moment… ! Yeah, their website has sustained vast improvement over the years, but it still is pretty finicky. Great. That took an entire hour! Now my eating schedule is out of kilter and I am starving! (RING) Oh, excuse me a moment, ”Good afternoon, this is Michelle with Renew Consulting. How may I help you? … Yes, absolutely. Have you had an opportunity to review our website? … Terrific! Just click on the training tab and take a look at our training schedule, then send an email to me with the details of who you need registered and at what location and I will then reply to your email with a confirmation and more detailed instructions…… ” I guess you don’t need to know the ENTIRE conversation, but that call comes in at least three to four times a day. I should just make a recording….

LUNCH TIME! Oh, wait. Everyone is back from lunch now. Cool, that means the microwave is free! I guess there are some perks to going an hour (or so) late. Alright, now to take a look at Therap and follow up on the notifications I received this morning. Oh, and that report that our Assistant Residential Director requested late yesterday. Logging into Therap (I really need to get my blog posted) … let’s get that report done. (Wow! That’s alot of information! Wait, that staff no longer works for us. What the heck? Hey! Neither does that person! Wait a minute, here. Oh, great. Evidently, not sure if any one of you is aware, but when you deactivate someone, if you do not remove a program from their privileges, then they show up on staff reports for that particular program. Alright, there’s a project that needs to be developed… ) Okay, export to Excel… edit and remove terminated staff… make the information easily readable… and, off to the requesting authority as an email attachment! And we can now take that task off the list!

I’m feeling hungry. Holy cow! It’s almost 2:00 and I never did go eat! I guess I could just have a piece of fruit and some crackers or trail mix. If I eat a meal now, I won’t be hungry at dinner. Alright, while I’m snacking, I can think of what I want to title my blog post…

(Incoming Skype call from Coastal Regional Coordinator) “Hi, Melissa, what’s up? … Yes, just be sure to scan them in color so we may reproduce them as a “certified” copy … If you can, that’s great, but if it presents a problem, I can split them from here … Yes, thanks … Okay, have a great afternoon … Bye.”

Sorry for the interruption. So, let’s see what’s on my calendar now. Oh, I need to upload last week’s certificates to SharePoint. Well, that’s gonna take a little time and I have three other messages that need return calls (and I really need to spend some time working on that blog), so I will work on the certs in a little while.

Okay, calls returned and those irons cooled from the hot fire… now to get those certs uploaded. Wow! It’s already after 3:30! Gotta get it in gear! And I should take a look at the registration for next week’s training and communicate with that area’s Regional Coordinator to be certain we have plenty of participants registered. (And I need to get on that blog.) First thing’s first… get SharePoint taken care of…

Alrighty then! It’s 4:25 now and I need to call the Regional Coordinator in the Northern Region to see about participants for next week’s training while I review the Registration spreadsheet. Okay, it looks like we are on track to hold training, so I will put on my calendar for tomorrow to send out reminder confirmation messages to the outside agencies… hey – there is my reminder to work on that Therap blog… I should get on that – CRIMINY! It’s 5:00! I guess I’ll have to snooze that one until tomorrow… (again…)

Gotta run!

Just read Pat Watt’s Blog on GERs – Grrrrrr and I have to agree with her.  Here is my similar story.

The Problem

Focus is small but growing.  As we grow we find things we did manually in a short period of time, now are laboriously long.  To speed up the process I am creating Excel programs designed to make life easier and more accurate.  Our payroll coding was long seen as a log jam in the getting our Care Providers paid every two weeks.  Using ISP Data, exporting it to Excel, and then using macros and lookup tables I was able to complete most of the payroll coding.  One piece of the required coding was to capture if the Day Hab took place in our After School Program.  In the location block our Care Providers would enter: After School Program.  Or they would enter ASP, or asp, or AFTER SCHOOL PROGRAM; one Care Provider with a sticky shift key always entered AFter SChool PRogram.  I tried to capture every possible variation using nested IF functions in Excel but gave up when I found one Care Provider who was very “creative” in her spelling.  As she told me,

“It is the mark of a handcuffed creativity, and a constipated mind to only spell words one way.”

I like a good turn of a phrase.  And in my effort to share these words of wisdom with my favorite elementary school teacher, I pulled out my phone to text her.

Brief Side Track

That surprises most folks that a dinosaur like me can text.  I am of the generation that took typing (not keyboarding) in Junior High School on a manual typewriter.  It took real effort to use a typewriter.  To type a single character, you pressed the key firmly, then an arm with your selected character snapped up and struck the printer ribbon and paper with a sharp thwack.  Thwack, thwack, thwack, ding!  When you heard the bell, you finished that word and then manually returned the carriage to return to the left side of the page and advanced a line.  I’m guessing 90% of you have no idea what a carriage is.

The difference between Typing and a Word Processor:

• “White out” was not a term for a bad blizzard, it was how you fixed typing errors.  Just hitting the backspace key didn’t fix anything.
• You used a dictionary to “spell check” and you had to do it before you typed the word.
• Your font and font size were determined by the typewriter you used; to change fonts you spent $300 to buy a different typewriter.
• If you wanted a copy of what you just typed, you grabbed a different sheet of paper and typed it again.
• And a mouse next to your keyboard was grounds for your roommate to move out.

Back to the story

We have this old fossil texting.  But the problem with someone from the Jurassic era is that our thumbs are not as limber as they used to be and texting is a hit or miss proposition.  To help me most cell phones have predictive text.  The function of predictive text is to help you rapidly enter correctly spelled words or specific abbreviations.  And the predictive text could learn new words too, like “Groovy” and “Far-out.”  And other new words like “AARP” and “Metamucil.”

The Solution?

Now if someone from my generation can learn how to use predictive text while texting on a cell phone, why can’t those young, bright and energetic folks from Therap insert predictive text in certain data fields?  Wouldn’t it be groovy if the Location box on ISP Data could use predictive text to help Care Providers enter “After School Program” the same way every time?

And if Therap can’t do that, then I would wonder who had the handcuffed creativity and constipated mind…

If we could, I would be LMAO…

When we first started using Therap, we put all of our Medical Appointments in the Therap calendar, just like we do on paper. Then Therap put the Appointments on everyone’s FirstPage/Dashboard so that users could see all of the appointments for Today and Tomorrow. Now we are turning off the calendar and only using HT.

This will save on double documenting in both places, therefore saving staff more work. Once again, Therap has saved us time and energy!

Thanks Therap!

Well, it is now official – my first certified trainer webinar has been completed – finally! (Sorry, Allison, for all of the previous webinar issues!) I am now looking forward to my next webinar in May. Thanks to those who attended and I enjoyed the discussions afterwards. Hopefully everyone could hear me OK with my voice out of commission. I promise I don’t sound like that normally!

I am also looking forward to the Kansas City conference next month!

As funding becomes harder to come by, many agencies are looking to open supplemental businesses to offset their operation costs.  At my agency, we have developed 2 businesses:  a print shop that services the community in designing and printing almost anything and an art studio.  I’d like to talk a bit more on the Studio…

This site will be open to the public in April, but we currently have the individuals we serve going there for day program services. (About 20 people rotate in and out of this site on a daily basis.)  This program was the dream of a volunteer, now current employee, Beth Kopf.  She decided to volunteer at the agency as an art instructor providing art therapy a few days a week.  Since a program like this has never been at our agency, many of the people we serve took to this immediately!  Her class size continued to grow to the point where her volunteer hours could not accommodate all the people that wanted to be a part of this.  When that happened, she was hired on full time to help our individuals continue to explore their artistic sides.

Most of our individuals found an outlet to communicate and create through this program.  Many of the pieces they have created were on display at Lewis University’s art show and some are permanent fixtures in 8 local Starbucks locations.  The acclaim received is what sparked the idea of actually opening a space to showcase all the talent we were seeing.

With this site opening soon, we are also offering this unique program to neighboring providers…we hope that their individuals want to explore their creativity as well in an environment build specifically for this.  In addition to the day program being at this site, we will be offering public art classes for kids and adults and will offer studio space for aspiring artists.  There are many local artists that have embraced our idea and have their works being displayed in the gallery already!  Here’s a few pictures of the site and the people at work:

If you want to see more of the work we are doing here, visit the Gallery website at www.gardengalleryandstudio.com and visit the Gallery Facebook page to see more of the art being turned out of this great program.

Are there any of you in the Therap-verse that are doing something similar?  If so, please comment…I’d love to hear and see what all you creative people are doing!

March is in full swing. In New York, this means that the first round of PROMOTE regional trainings are also well underway. Having had the opportunity to participate in the Rochester regional training, I am looking forward to implementing this new approach in Western New York. PROMOTE, which stands for Positive Relationships Offer More Opportunities To Everyone; is replacing the current, SCIP-R (Strategies for Crisis Intervention and Prevention); which has been the standard in NY since the 90s. Although a bit longer than SCIP, PROMOTE stands head and shoulders above it’s predecessor. As Newton once said, “…on the shoulders of giants.” It is only because of the vision and dedication of those that have helped shape the field, that we can see our way.