|
Mom keeps saying that it is supposed to snow tomorrow (we had a dusting yesterday), but weather.com only shows rain\snow showers at 05.
Regardless, each of my Thursday clients is down a paved road.
I am infinitely more concerned with the new way that we are supposed to write notes. For four years, each of my supervisors has passed off on notes like the following:
Subjective: Tommy was in a good mood and cooperated with minimal prompting.
Objective: Tommy independently identified 15/75 common objects. Tommy identified another 55/60 common objects, correctly articulated 43/50 words starting with /r/ at the word level, and followed 8/10 three-step manipulative directions, each with minimal prompting.
Plan: Continue as planned.
If I need to modify an activity, it goes under plan. I might write "Tommy met the standard for the current flash cards; start using a new set of flash cards."
Arizona is trying to make providers prove that our services are necessary. It sounds like they are going to start auditing our paperwork and I hate to think what would happen if they decide that someone's session notes are inadequate.
Our agency hired a therapist just to review all of our notes, which sounds excruciatingly tedious. Worse, this seems like all of the lame things that I needed to write for school, where the single most important factor was how long it was.
There were probably earlier examples, but the first that I remember was our eleventh-grade chemistry teacher sharing a twenty-page lab report a student in another class wrote. One sentence was something along the lines of "I made sure to clean up my test tubes and put them away so the next student did not find them in the sink and need to take care of them."
Why is that worth including in a report?
The sample notes are four full paragraphs, each with a number of sentences that seem completely unnecessary. It is like writing half a quarterly progress report every single week, with random information instead of the useful data that we usually report.
We are supposed to be able to write notes in five minutes. If we have twenty or thirty clients this is a lot of extra time each week.
|