Don’t Get Me Started… #SoCS

Hi everyone. Today’s prompt for #SoCS is “Don’t get me started”. Oh my, don’t get me started… or I’ll rant forever.

I have this habit of ranting about my care to whoever will listen. Not even about my current care, but about my care at the intensive support home. This afternoon, I was telling a staff who’s just quit smoking that, now that institution grounds are officially a non-smoking area, I no longer permit staff cigarette breaks during my activities.

I say that grounds are “officially” a non-smoking area because, in reality, no-one listens and even the higher-ups smoke on grounds.

I am a non-smoker and yet I understand the fact that clients want to smoke in the yard. Who are the higher-ups, whether they abide by the rules or not, to prohibit smoking in our own home? Well, outside of it, of course, because yes the non-smokers have a right to a smoke-free home.

Staff, however, are usually the ones who smoke the most and I don’t fully understand that. I mean, yes, it’s an addiction, but it’s also a habit. And, besides it being just plain yuck, staff are taking extra breaks in order to meet their “needs”.

Back to my not permitting staff to take cigarette breaks anymore. Every staff here understands, even the hardcore smokers, but back at the intensive support home, not so. I told this staff about a staff doing my morning activity time slot. At the start of it, she said that it’s long, right? It’s ninety minutes. “Can I have a cigarette?” I told her to stand on my balcony and discard her cig safely. Half an hour later, I was doing a clay project. “You’re now busy with the clay anyway. Can I smoke again?” I reluctantly let her use my balcony again. Half an hour later still, an hour into my activity, she was like “I’m going to need to discuss something with a coworker”. And off she was. When she came back ten minutes later, I told her I didn’t like her essentially taking three breaks during a ninety-minute support moment. “But you don’t have one-on-one,” she ranted, saying that with my “just having extra care” this means she could leave me alone whenever she needed to. And besides, she didn’t need to offer up an explanation to the client for her decisions. Well guess what? Yes, staff do need to justify their decisions to me when these affect my care.

And don’t get me started on the difference or lack thereof between one-on-one and extra care. They’re both just sums of money the institution receives for a client. Yes, some clients have more one-on-one hours or extra care hours or whatever than I do, some even having 24-hour one-on-one. However, these sums of money are based on average amounts of care a client needs. If a client has 24/7 one-on-one (which none of the clients at that home had), it means they on average need one staff with them all the time, but sometimes two and sometimes briefly none. I at the time had seven hours of extra care/one-on-one support a day and my support coordinator claimed that my day schedule at the time spanned nine hours. There are various reasons why firstly this wasn’t true and secondly it doesn’t mean I had two hours of support that wasn’t being paid for, but don’t get me started on that…