What is the job title?
Psychiatric nurse (RPN)
What is your job description?
Works with people with cronic and persistent mental illnesses to promote recovery.
What are the tasks you preform?
Description: the CRT provides residential care to clients needing psychosocial growth and rehabilitative measures including social integration benefit of living with others. Housing options include varying degrees of staffing support such as 24 hour supervised living in licensed facilities, family care, etc.
This what the definition I found in one of the pan flips given to me, but it didn’t do justice to half the work my aunt and her co- workers are doing. From 8-6 about 35 workers have client meetings, visit shelters, food banks, put together programs for adjusting back to normal living, giving needles and medications to people who are sick on the streets, cleaning people’s homes, and driving them back and forth from place to place. This list doesn’t explain all the hard work these people put into their jobs, by the end of the day I was exhausted. When I asked my aunt this question, she responded that is basically a personal assistant to 85 people.
What qualifications do you need for this job?
Degree in Psychiatric nursing, 80+ hours of education a year. (my aunt has been doing it for more than 20 years) and usually students go to Frazer health units and mirror the pre- existing workers.
Skills and attributes?
Empathetic towards people, nonjudgmental, open minded, flexible, able to think out of the box.
What are things you like about this job?
The people she works with, of course the clients. But mostly how busy and flexible each day is.
What are some things you dislike?
Not enough resources, and when you hear sad things happening to your clients.
How do you see the job changing in five years?
Not by much, mostly just increase the case load.
STUDENT REFLECTION
3 positive reasons you would want this job?
- I love communicating with people, I am very social so talking with people all day would be easy for me.
- I want to help people, I don’t want to be well- known. I just want to save one person, I want to say that I changed someone’s life.
- I love how busy and filled every day is, never a minute of calming down time. I always want to be doing something else and be super busy.
I used to always want to be a police officer (SWAT) but after going to this “take your kid to work day” I’ve decided that I now want to be a psychiatric nurse, I saw myself doing that every day.
3 reasons you would not like the job?
- Sometimes clients don’t get back into society, and sometimes horrible things happen to them. Death is a very common one, especially from drugs. I cried when my three-day old fish dies, I’m very emotional so this would be a difficult part of the job for me. Any death is sad, but when you’re super close with the person its heart breaking.
- How early it is, Monday- Friday my aunt goes to work from 7-6 (I came an hour late) I’m not a morning person so waking up that early is not something I’d be super excited about.
- How dangerous it is. My aunt told me stories of angry clients blocking her in a corner of her office and threating her. That would be so scary, but it would have to be a compromise for all the reasons I want to do this job.
Is this job for you?
Yes. After doing this I want to do this job so bad, I had so much fun. It was exciting and never had one dull moment. It has been one of my favorite days all year long, I’ve never enjoyed doing something as much as this. I could honestly see myself doing this for a job one day.
Explain the values of TYKTW?
I think it’s important, in grade 9 we have just started high school. We need to start thinking about what field we want to learn about, in grade 9,10,11 I think people should start to have an idea about what they want their job to be. Not exactly but to at least have an outline. Going to your parent’s work is important as you can then compare their work with what you want to do. Who know maybe you’ll want to do that for the rest of your life?
I was not allowed to take photos when I was there (as they had clients) but I got a “google maps” image of the street view.
