Good afternoon (where I am anyways!),
I suppose I will start my first blog entry by introducing myself. My name is Tony Puckett, and I am a Residential Manager for an ICF/Retirement home at Opportunity Foundation in Williston, ND. You may have seen Williston in the news for either all the oil activity or as the coldest place in the US. I also am one of the Therap Administrators for our agency, and am the Therap trainer. (They call me the local Therap guru around here:-)
I just finished training a Therap class for our new employees on Wednesday. I absolutely love training, and I love Therap, so I always look forward to the classes. One area that I find very important when training is T-Logs. In the pre-Therap days, we would write Progress Notes. Each supervisor would give their new employees a quick run-down of the different charting, and the employees would read through old progress notes and then begin writing their own. Today, I attempt to work with employees on what they should include in T-Logs, ways they word things to maintain respect and professionalism, and such. This can at times be challenging.
Two main things I stress to employees on T-Logs are:
1) When I read your T-Log, will I have any questions? If so, you may want to expound a little more!
2) If the person you are writing about was your child, how would you feel after reading the T-Log?
What about your agency? When training on T-Logs are there any tricks you use to train new employees? Is there any specific training material you have that would help other agencies? Share some our your ideas with us!
I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!
Thanks for the questions to add to our Therap orientation. I also like to spend time discussing not only “what” should be written but also “how”. I review our Mission, Vision, and Values and give examples of how those are important while documenting within Therap (for example Dignity and Respect is a value – talk about how to write about certain difficult topics respectfully).
I also “briefly” touch on how the GERs are used within our Incident Managment System so they understand why we are particular about following the special instructions we have developed for specific types of incidents. I hope this helps people realize that their work does not go into cyberspace to never be used again.
We have identified questions I review with them. We ask them to consider these especially if they read something that may be upsetting and want to respond to it. Reread what you read and ask yourself these questions:
1) Will this help build teamwork or impede it? (We discuss how there are many teams throughout LQ that make up one big team.)
2) Does it build up coworkers or jeopardize coworker relationships?
3) Will it cause constructive or destructive feelings in others?
4) Is the intent to facilitate improving supports for the person or making a point?
Then I have them complete a checklist that involves creating t-logs and GERs within the TEST mode. We use the t-girl to teach the various modules. Love it!
I’d love to hear about others training tips.
Welcome, Tony! Thanks for a great blog and joining the Certified Trainers group.