Quality Training

Picture yourself as a case manager, or a peer support staff, in the Southern Arizona behavioral health system, at one of the agencies. (“Agencies” refers to those organizations that have been called Comprehensive Service Provider, Intake and Coordination of Care Agency, or most recently, Health Home.) It is around October or November of 2015, when the regional behavioral health authority (RBHA) changed from CPSA to Cenpatico Integrated Care. You still have your regular duties, and now on top of that, the new RBHA has new training requirements. Conveniently, these can mostly be met using an online training system, which can be checked by Cenpatico to make sure you meet the requirements. Not so conveniently, there are quite a lot of new trainings. Also not so conveniently, your agency might only give you a small amount of time to take these trainings, which if properly done take longer than the time the agency is giving you. Or, your agency may require you to do all of your regular duties while doing the trainings.

So far, we have the situation as follows: lots of new trainings, supposed to take a certain amount of time, and not enough time given to complete them. Or, you have to switch yourself back and forth between the trainings and the phone calls, home visits, appointments, crises, or other things that keep interrupting your flow. You might say “I’m a multitasker!” but the reality is that this can be pretty stressful for many multitaskers. Now remember, you still have your “productivity” or “metrics” to meet, and if you don’t meet them you can be written up or fired for not making the agency enough money. You might also say that the regular duties are your responsibility anyway, but the agency also has ways to allow someone to cover your duties for a short time.

Some of the training covers things you already know, except there may be some new things thrown in that you will be expected to know. Some of it is new to you. You will be tested at the end of each training module. At the end of each module is a statement that says something like “I, (your name), affirm under penalty of perjury that this is correct.” You have to click on the box next to this to sign it, and complete the module.

Given the stress, some workers were literally crying in their cubicles, or becoming very irritable, or expressing their stress in other ways.

A way may have been found to help deal with this situation. Answers may have been shared, and soon answer keys may have been created and quietly shared between workers. This might have helped make the trainings go by faster, and reduce some of the stress. For many, this could have been needed to actually complete the trainings and not risk being fired for not meeting their billing. Supervisors might have known, but officially they were not supposed to know. The answer keys may have been quietly placed into the shredder when done with.

Another way was simply to speed through the module and hope you were able to answer the test questions. If you knew enough of the stuff in the training modules, you might have been able to answer correctly.

This may seem interesting to some, but it was a fact of life at the time. It may have offended some workers, but they were faced with the choice of keeping or losing their jobs and their health insurance. Some ended up finding other jobs and quitting soon after this ordeal, or just going away. Both workers and supervisors sometimes ended up being “checked out,” physically present but burned out.

It would seem better that the workers would be given more time to do the training modules, properly, in those agencies that at least gave some time for this. It would seem more sensible that workers be allowed to dedicate time to do the training modules, at those agencies that would not allow it. It is possible that some agencies allowed their workers the time and attention needed to complete the training. Since all this happened over 2 years ago, maybe it doesn’t really matter anymore.