The Reality of Working in a Forensic Inpatient Hospital | Mental Health Support Worker

The Reality of Working in a Forensic Inpatient Hospital | Mental Health Support Worker

hello there everyone and welcome back to my channel welcome to my first chatty video in what feels like absolutely forever i’m really excited to film this but there are two things i want to mention before i begin number one i’m in my pajamas and have a drink i wanted to do this all professionally in my uniform have a proper setup but i’m not feeling 100 today so i thought we’d have a more relaxed vibe for this video and number two i am filming this quite late on in the evening so if the lighting changes throughout then please excuse that there’s really not too much i can do about it although i have tried to use my ring light but getting into the video you may have seen my two recent vlogs the first one was my last week working as a mental health support worker in a forensic inpatient hospital and the second one was my first week working in the community mental health team that’s because over the last few weeks i’ve been in the transition of changing jobs but i thought it would be good to talk a little bit more about my experience in the hospital setting because a lot of you may be here through watching my journey as a psychology student you may be here because you’re a psychology graduate like myself or you may just be interested in working in mental health settings and i never knew much about inpatient settings before i worked in them and now that i do i thought i would share my wisdom two little warnings before i begin the first one is that obviously i’m going to be speaking about things that relate to an inpatient setting in this video that may include restraints self-harm thoughts of suicide and so if you’re not in the right headspace to watch this and please click off it right now because i wouldn’t want to distress anybody it’s always going to be here so you can come back at a later time and watch the video the second thing is that during this video i’m speaking purely based on my own experience so everything is either my opinion or based on my experience working in that setting other people might have different thoughts and opinions and that’s fine but as i said i wanted to share my journey and my experience doing so so let’s get started shall we i’ve got a massive list on my phone of things that i wanted to go through because i don’t want to miss anything off but we’ll start on the first section which is where did i work and this is just going to be a very brief explanation in case you’re completely new to this terminology i don’t want to lose anybody before i even begin so i worked in a forensic inpatient hospital an impatient hospital is basically where people go when they get sectioned under the mental health act and they live there essentially and we are in charge of looking after them the forensic part of my hospital means that most of my patients either came from the prison system because their mental health deteriorated whilst they were in prison or they came directly to the hospital because they weren’t well enough to go to prison so a lot of my patients have committed a crime and had some sort of forensic background the particular hospital where i worked at also catered for people with learning disabilities so in addition to the forensic background they may have had some sort of learning difficulties as well and that is basically the setting summed up really quickly if i haven’t explained that too well feel free to comment down below and i’ll try and explain it again as best as i can the next little section is probably what you’re all here for and that is what was my role and at the start i always considered myself to be a healthcare assistant however it gets very confusing then when you think of a healthcare assistant in a general hospital that changes the beds escorts people to the toilets assists and nurses because it is a completely different role and so my actual role is to find as a mental health support worker or a care provider or care worker that is what we tend to use in mental health settings so it’s basically a mental health version of a health care assistant however our roles and responsibilities are very different and i will explain a little bit more about that in a second before i do that i just want to quickly mention that i did this job as part of nhs professionals or nhsp it’s basically a system where you can do agency work or agency style type work for your local nhs trust so you pick your own shifts and hours and can work as much or as little as you like you can however do this job permanently either on a part-time or a full-time contract i just chose not to do that and i think i have wrote down a little bit further down on my list why i didn’t do that but that’s basically how i got into this job i did it through nhsp and so what exactly did i do there i worked on a variety of low and medium secure forensic units i obviously wasn’t limited to that hospital as on nhsp you can work anywhere within the trust and there’s lots of different sites you can work i just chose to work at this particular hospital because that’s where i fitted in the most and that’s what really called my name my role whilst i was working on nosy units did vary dependent on where i worked but as a whole it’s very patient focused all day long a typical day for me would involve doing lots of observations so if a patient is particularly high risk they might be one to one or two to one which is when they need a little bit of extra staff support and so where they go i go i follow them around hence the one-to-one observation level i also take patients on escorted leave so we might go shopping we could go to the cinema we could just go for a walk around the grounds and walk around the local parks any league that they are allowed to take out of the hospital i can also facilitate that but then at the same time i also do a lot of ward-based activities such as arts and crafts i’ve done a lot of diamond art a lot of drawing wood work however on the units where i would work more regularly if we were short staffed i would definitely do more of a paperwork based role so i’d do the security checks in the morning and evening and make sure that everything was okay i’ll do patient’s incentive plans and i’d also use care notes to document the shift summary and any incidents throughout the day so it really does vary every day is completely different so it is a really interesting job that keeps you on your toes and always gives you something new to do each day which i absolutely love i hope that gives you a little bit of a better understanding as to what my role was i’m now going to move on and talk about some of the positives of the role again this is all my own opinions other people might feel differently but these are the things that really stood out for me that made me love my job i have already mentioned some of them so for instance choosing my own hours was one of them if one week i only wanted to work one day a week i could if the next week i wanted to work five days i also could and so that flexibility was perfect for me especially because i did this job coming out of uni so i was able to slowly integrate myself into working full-time and so i did really enjoy that about my job and i already missed it and i’m only three weeks into my new one the second positive for me is that the pay was really good i know people often aren’t very transparent online about their wages but i’m completely okay with doing that because all you have to do is type in my role and type in nhs and you can see exactly how much i’ve got paid so for nhsp you actually work as a band too rather than a band free as if you would when you were permanent i don’t know what that pay is per year you can definitely have a look as i already said but for me if i worked a normal weekday monday to friday i would get paid 10 pounds 81 an hour i believe and then you get paid more for night shifts and for saturdays that was like 14 pounds something an hour and then on sundays it was closer to 19 pounds and so for me to come out of uni and go to that i was really really happy with myself because obviously it depends how much you work as i said but i was earning about 2 000 pounds a month after tax some months when i really worked hard so i do miss the pay and the pay is very good if that’s something you’re looking at getting into the third positive for me is that it was such good experience as i’ve already mentioned i’m a psychology graduate and working in that setting allowed me to get really good clinical experience especially if you’re looking at going further in the psychology field for instance i may or may not be interested in doing my doctorate at some point and the last two positives for me are the reason why i actually love the job so much the main thing for me is that i loved working so closely with the patients and being with them for all that time in a day you may think you get fed up of it but you really don’t i developed such good therapeutic relationships with some of them and because you’re there for such a long time working there it kind of became a home away from home for me and the final positive for me seeing the progress that those patients make whether that was moving from a medium secure unit to a low secure unit or just being able to manage their emotions a little bit better it is a really rewarding job so on top of developing those relationships with patients it’s also really nice to see progress that has been made however i’m going to move on to the negatives because you can’t have the good without the bad and there was definitely aspects of the job that i didn’t enjoy as much or something i just really hated and didn’t like at all and that’s absolutely fine for me personally the good did outweigh the bad but i do have quite a few on my list here almost as many as the positive so i’m going to get started with them so going back to me working on nhsp obviously one positive for me was that i got to choose my own hours however the negative is that you don’t really receive the benefits that you get in a permanent contracted job so i don’t get any sick pay i don’t get official annual leave and you don’t get maternity pay uh compassionate leave anything you can think of like that you get when you have a permanent contract you don’t get when you work for nhsp which is understandable because it’s not necessarily designed for people to do full-time some people might just do one shift a month some people might do five days a week and so you don’t get those benefits and that again was a reason for me leaving which i will speak a little bit more about in a second the second negative is probably going to be the one that you’re expecting if you’ve clicked onto this video and have knowledge of what these settings involve as it’s the one that everybody says and that is getting involved in incidents so occasionally as staff we will have to restrain patients if they are a risk to themselves or to others and this can be in a variety of different levels it could be a really low level hold where we’re just basically holding their arm and encouraging them to move away from the situation but on the other side of the spectrum it can be a high level hold and we can be on the floor in these positions for you know any amount of time that is necessary in order to de-escalate the situation and it’s not a nice thing at all it’s not something that anybody i work with enjoys and i can probably say that for a fact i don’t think anybody has ever enjoyed a restraint patient or staff it’s never nice to see somebody in distress especially when you work with them most of the time and you know how they are when they’re having a good day it’s sad to see them on a bad day and you do get desensitized in some ways to those sorts of incidents like when i get in the car and i come home i’m very rarely affected by them and they can be very intense sometimes but it’s still never nice to see somebody in that situation and it is a similar sort of situation for self-harm as well obviously when you’re working in those sort of settings you are going to witness patients try to self-harm or succeed in self-harming i don’t want to go into too much detail but you do get the gist you obviously witness some pretty traumatic things and as i said you do become desensitised to it but it’s never nice to see somebody go through that at all so those two are definitely negatives of the job which if i could take away i would in a heartbeat another negative for me is staff shortages and i’m laughing a little bit when i say this because i know everyone’s probably sick of nhs staff complaining about staff shortages but it is a real issue in any setting but especially in an inpatient setting like this when if you’re short on staff the risk to yourself massively escalates and so does the risk to the patients and other patients on the unit it is a really sticky situation i’ve turned up to shifts where there’s only been myself and another mental health support worker and we’ve had to work without the nurse for the day and that’s happened to me numerous times and yeah it’s it’s such a shame because it means that when you’re short on staff you can’t provide the care that you want to provide patients will often miss out on doing activities or going out on their leave just because we don’t have enough staff to facilitate that in a safe manner so it is a real pain and a shame when you are short on staff unfortunately it’s just one of the things that comes with working in the nhs you just have to kind of suck it up and accept it but it is definitely a negative to the job and after saying that i don’t like it when the staff aren’t there i’m not going to say that i don’t like it when some staff are there i’ve often worked with staff who just don’t engage with the patients all day long for the 12 hours of the day and it does break my heart when that happens because it’s never fair on the patients to have a staff team that aren’t willing to engage with them and it obviously changes the whole mood of the unit if you have a bad staff team on you can tell by the mood of the patients and the mood of the staff that work there regularly you can just tell instantly but if you have a good staff team on the day is completely different it’s the same when you work anywhere if you worked in i don’t know mcdonald’s and you had people on that weren’t willing to engage with the tasks as much as other people were it brings down a whole morale of the staff and then in my instance it also brings down the morale of the patients and that is probably the worst negative out of all of the ones that i’ve listed that really affects me the most and i grew quite intolerant of it towards the end because it just started upsetting me because i care so much about what i do that when i see somebody that doesn’t care as much or doesn’t seem like they care as much it really just it got on my nerves it really grinded my gears as people say but yeah those are all of my negatives so now you’ve heard the positives and the negatives if you are interested in doing that job you probably made your mind up now whether it’s for you or not but now you’re probably wondering why i actually left the job why have i moved to the community mental health team when i love my mental health support worker role so much and i still do and i have such a passion for it why did i leave why did i quit it the main reason for me was because i needed a permanent contract as myself and charlie interested in buying a house the reason i didn’t go for a permanent contract as a support worker because as i mentioned you can get one of those is because when you work permanently you don’t have any choice over your hours so for me personally i cannot work night shifts and because i can’t really negotiate that on a permanent contract it wasn’t for me that that role as a permanent member of staff doesn’t suit my needs very well i only like it when i can do it flexibly whereas my new role in the community mental health team is nine till five and that moves on to the next reason as to where i left and that’s also because charlie is a community mental health nurse and so she also works nine till five which means that we actually get to spend all of our time together now when we’re not at work wow not all of it but a lot more of it because previously i was working the weekends due to wanting the extra money but she has all of the weekends off so the last few months we haven’t really been able to spend much time together and that’s a real shame because it means that my work-life balance isn’t really that good so that was definitely a contributing factor to me going to work nine till five a massive contributing factor another reason for me is as i mentioned earlier i’m a psychology graduate i’ve recently finished my master’s in psychology in september 2021 if you’re interested in watching anything related to that whether that’s vlogs or sit down chatty videos like this have a scroll back on my channel because i documented the whole of my master’s journey as that’s kind of when i started my youtube channel but as a psychology graduate it was great experience working at the hospital because it really gave me an insight into how mental health settings work and how they function and as i said i got to work alongside lots of other mental health care professionals but in my day-to-day role i didn’t actually get to practice many psychological skills and so for someone that is potentially interested in progressing in psychology that wasn’t really ideal for me so all of those reasons combined are basically why i left the job it wasn’t because of any of the negatives that i mentioned because as i said for me the good definitely outweighed the bad and even in my new job i have good bits and i have bad bits and i have such a passion for working in those inpatient settings the good news is that i haven’t actually left i only have to do one shift every three months on nhsp so i am keeping it alongside my full-time nine til five and i have already been back since and done a shift on the weekend and i think that’s really useful for me because it still allows me to develop and maintain that skill set that i’ve got from over there whilst acquiring a new one in my new job as well which kind of leads me nicely into my next section which is would i recommend the job 100 as i said i’ve had the best time there and you may hear differently of other people but as someone who really believes in patient care and enjoys developing those relationships it was a perfect job for me and it made me realize that i really enjoyed working on that one-to-one basis with people and being with the patients is exactly what i wanted to do and so moving to my new job which is a lot more office based is definitely a risk for me but it’s also important for me to explore other opportunities and it will enable me to see if going down the clinical psychology doctorate route is definitely for me so i would definitely recommend the job to anybody that is interested as i said earlier if you have any more questions feel free to pop them down below in the comment box or message me on instagram i’m happy to help as much as i possibly can and so that has basically summed up my time working as a mental health support worker i don’t think i’ve missed anything off my list i have checked it all apologies if i’ve come across very scripty i really just didn’t want to miss out any information that i thought was key so i have kind of read everything off my phone my other chatty videos are a lot more laid back i promise but i do hope you’ve enjoyed watching this and i hope it’s given you some insight as to what it was like for me working in that role and if you’re interested i hope it’s definitely encouraged you to go for it if you’ve enjoyed the video then please don’t forget to like comment and subscribe down below also head down to the description box and click on the link to follow me on instagram i’m trying to post very frequently about my days in my new job whether that’s posting my schedule or just giving any updates that i possibly can i’m really trying to be very active over there on instagram in the hope that it gives you an insight as to what it’s like working in the community mental health team especially in my job as a group facilitator but other than that we have reached the end of the video so i really hope you’ve enjoyed i’ll bring this to a close now and i will see you all in my next one which i believe should be another weekly vlog thank you for watching bye you

The Reality of Working in a Forensic Inpatient Hospital | Mental Health Support Worker

As one chapter closes for me and another one opens, I thought it would be good to reflect on my time working as a mental health support worker. In this video I discuss what my job role entailed, the positives and negatives of the position and why I quit. I hope this gives you an insight into what working in these settings is like and encourages you to work towards your career goals. If you enjoy the video then please don’t forget to like, comment and subscribe! Also hit the notification bell so you don’t miss out on my next upload!

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