The Residential Youth Care Worker in Action: A Collaborative, Competency-Based Approach

Explore how these therapeutic practices can enhance your work as a residential youth care worker!

The Residential Youth Care Worker in Action: A Collaborative, Competency--Based Approach will help youth care workers administer psychotropic medications, understand psychiatric labels, handle crisis and staffing, and give accurate assessments. Emphasizing ideas that focus on the strengths and abilities of young people from the assessment phase of treatment through discharge, this guidebook will help you take the views and actions of youths into consideration from a change-oriented perspective in order to offer your clients appropriate services.

The Residential Youth Care Worker in Action serves to fill in the gap between therapists and residential youth care workers (RYCWs) by emphasizing ideas that therapists have been using for years. This resourceful book takes a relatively new direction in the field by focusing on competency-based as opposed to problem-focused methods. Many of the major concerns that you face as a youth care worker are addressed with easy-to-learn-and-use therapeutic ideas, suggestions, new approaches, and techniques that are demonstrated through case illustrations. Some of these competency-based ideas include:

• focusing on what is changeable for youths as opposed to what is not
• exploring how you can use language to convey respect and facilitate change by focusing on a youth’s possibilities instead of his or her past behavior
• using solution talk instead of problem talk, such as saying a youth is very energetic at times instead of hyperactive
• respecting young people, their viewpoints, and experiences to create a context and climate that is conducive to change
• exploring “future roads” by helping young people create compelling futures, dissolve barriers, and take action toward those preferred futures
• managing crisis intervention while simultaneously allowing youths to keep their pride
• helping young people realize their accountability within the roles of both psychotropic medications and psychiatric labels The Residential Youth Care Worker in Action explains several approaches that you can use to positively impact the lives of the young people in your residential facility. Complete with handouts and diagrams such as a post-crisis debriefing form, a level promotion petition form, and a weekly success chart that can be reproduced and used in various residential programs, The Residential Youth Care Worker in Action will help you create a positive atmosphere for youths and prepare them for a successful future.
  
  

Bob Bertolino is an Educational Support Counselor for the Francis Howell School in St. Charles, Missouri.