Maternal and Child Health Professional: 

They used to think I had to sort everything out and now I’ve realised you can ask the client what they want from you or sometimes you just realise once you’re having the same conversation every time just take a step back and listen and empathise and that’s probably what’s going to work for them.

I suppose the main time that I might feel out of my depth is if there’s a social issue. So if there’s, if the mother has got some psych problems or if there’s big family problems or something like that, or if there’s just a situation I don’t know about. So I suppose I’d look for more information myself, I’d speak to my colleagues, sometimes if there’s something I don’t know about, now that we’re all on email, I’ll send out an email and say does ‘anyone know who would you refer to with this situation?’, so all the colleagues can pop back. And that’s really interesting actually you often get a lot of different suggestions there. And sometimes you think you’re beating your head against the wall and you’re doing everything that you can think of and then if you talk to your colleagues and you say you thought of ‘this this and this’, and they say ‘yeh well that’s all you can do’ and then you think ‘ok well I’ve got to put that responsibility back on the parent, I’ve done as much as I can and I can support them but I can’t necessarily fix it’.

I had a situation a few years ago where I’d spent months talking about sleep and settling with a client and eventually she went to a mother baby in it and then I saw her after then and everything had been fixed and everything was going really well. And I said to her what did you learn and what made the difference, or what did they say that I didn’t, and she basically said to me outright they said exactly what you said but I just didn’t believe you, I didn’t believe that a child would need that much day time sleep and what have you. So I was actually quite pleased to hear that because I thought ok well there was nothing else I could have done it just needed to come from a difference source and maybe more intensive worked for her. I found that quiet satisfying because I was a bit frustrated that I couldn’t help her and then when she basically said I’d been saying the right things I found that good for me.

The main thing that I turn to is my colleague, that’s the great thing about working together. But that means we often don’t get off on time because we’re staying back til 6 o’clock talking about clients. So I think the best person to de-brief with is a colleague. Sometimes I might talk about something to my husband but he doesn’t quiet get it. We have clinical supervision meetings once a month with our colleagues where we talk about clients or situations and it’s supposed to be from our perspective more then from the clients perspective but that often gets you thinking and listening to other peoples experiences as well as your own. So I do but not in a formal way, sometimes you might just be driving your car and just have a think about something that happened. If there’s something that’s bothering me that’s often when I will talk to a colleague and say ‘this is how I dealt with it, how do you think you’d deal with it or what suggestions have you got?’