My professional identity

Welcome to my first blog post! In this blog post, I will discuss my professional identity, where I fit within the system and some of my professional values. Feel free to use the reply section at the bottom to engage in a discussion once you have read the post.

My workplace is funded by Ontario Health. Ontario Health manages and funds the ontarian health care system. My position at the Centre de santé régional de Kapuskasing et région includes two componnets. First, my title is volunteer lead. Most of my work revolves around that component. This means, coordinating, managing, training, educating and recruiting volunteers. I currently have a team of approximately 50 volunteers with whom I work every week. We have many programs functioning because of our amazing team of volunteers. The theme defined by Volunteer Canada for this year was volunteering is empathy in action. I'm a strong believer that every volunteer makes proof of empathy and that a volunteer program needs to have benefits for the community and the clients. I also believe that volunteering should have benefits for the volunteer as well. It's a great way to meet new people, break social isolation, stay active or feel like you're helping the community. Some studies even prove that volunteering reduces mortality (Musick, Herzog & House, 1999) and that volunteering reduced depressive symptoms (Music & Wilson, 2003) According to the Canadian Code For Volunteer Involvement (Volunteer_Canada_Canadian_Code_for_Volunteer_Involvement_2017.pdf, 2017), volunteering is about building relationships. The second part of my job is with the Aging at Home department. When I have spare time as my primary role, I act as a worker for Aging at Home. This means I do activity coordination, case management, friendly visits to homes and security checks on seniors.

I have a bit of an unconventional role in the health care system so it can get complicated on where I fall. It's very broad who I get to work with within a week. Directly in my workplace, I get to work with a great interdisciplinary team. I work with doctors, nurse practitioners, Registered Nurses, Registered Practical Nurses, Dieticians, social prescribers and Social Workers. My interactions with these health care professionals vary. Often, we get references from Doctors or Nurse Practitioners about new clients and what are their needs. That's where we decide if we get a volunteer to help out (for example, for friendly visiting or grocery delivery) or if the case is more complex we will access the needs and help by ourselves. I've interacted before with our social worker as a volunteer lead since she wanted to organize painting classes as a therapeutic activity for her clients. I also get to work with other people from the community such as personal support workers, family members, senior building managers and many others. I also work with lots of community services such as shuttle services, grocery stores, personal support workers, food banks and other agencies to help their best respond to the needs of the clients. These interactions vary every week.

My core professional values always stay but I believe it's important to adapt and grow with the nature of your work. Working for an organization such as a health centre, 3 of the professional values that are the most important to me are self-motivation, adaptability and critical thinking. In my organization, we have a job description outlined but we are not unionized. This gives us the flexibility to go above and beyond for our clients to offer the best service possible and work case by case. Although I have a supervisor, we’re given a lot of flexibility and we're trusted with what we do. That’s why I believe self-motivation is an essential professional value. If you’re self-motivated, you will perform best and will get to help more people. I find adaptability important as we often need to adapt to the need of different clients. As I'm new in the field, every week a new scene comes up and I need to discuss it with my colleagues or do research to take the right action. As for critical thinking, we’re often left to figure out what would work best for a client or if we identify a need in the community and bring a program to life to fill that need. Critical thinking is also essential in volunteer recruitment as I need to choose the best volunteers for the tasks. These three professional values will follow me throughout my career.

To conclude, I'm curious to know if you have a volunteer lead in your organization. Where do they fall within your system? Who do they have interactions with? Do you know what are their professional values? Engage in a discussion with them and leave a comment in my blog post!

Reference

Musick MA, Herzog AR, House JS. Volunteering and mortability among older adults : Findings from a national sample, Journals of Gerontology : Social Sciences, 1999, vol. 54 (pg. S173-S180).

Musick MA, Wilson J. Volunteering and depression : The role of psychological and social resources in different age groups, Social Science & Medicine, 2003, vol. 56 (pg. 259-269).

Volunteer Canada. (2017). Canadian Code For Volunteer Involvement. Volunteer_Canada_Canadian_Code_for_Volunteer_Involvement_2017.pdf