Secrets of your trade.

@smotheroffive Thanks! I love my job and actually many of our kids will end up in a lovely home where they feel accepted, cared for, and safe: they may go on to to well in life and be great humans! But it is frustrating when carers are crap.

On the subject of the thread I have little to offer, no exciting tricks in my trade! Certainly no bonuses for removing children!!

Long time nurse here
We aren't embarrassed about performing intimate examinations and don't even register how well "groomed" you are. But we do recognise you get embarrassed and compensate for it.
Generally we love the face to face aspect of patients- the politics wear us down
We dislike rudeness and they're the worst sort of patients
If you are worried about something your appointment will be better if you tell us succinctly what, how long for, affect on you then we work from there
And the majority aren't shagging the doctors (there is a minority though )

ladyfuschia that's a very moving inside account of such desperate situations. That how failed some DC are is so sad and I can't imagine how hard a job it is to work in, and also hopefully rewarding, like you mentioned serendipity.

A note on foster carers - i’m a social worker working with long term Looked After children. Most of them in foster care rather than alternative care provisions.

I am constantly humbled by carers, who give their homes, energy & frequently years when they would be winding down and retiring to our children.

However, there is a national shortage of foster carers and especially where we live in the SE but semi-rural, not many people can afford to have spare rooms and one person not working to be able to foster.
We have carers we know are not the standard we expect, and no amount of training is going to improve. Those who won’t or can’t accept and work with children who have complex and mixed behaviours. In our team we might try and avoid using them but they probably do short term care. Our team is focussed on matching children to carers who we feel are likely to meet their specific needs, but it’s subjective and an inexact science. We do not use someone just because they have a spare room at that time but occasionally there might be an emergency that does require that: funnily enough sometimes that works out serendipitously!

I have removed a child from a placement at least twice because the carers weren’t meeting the children's needs - mostly we try not to as just like removing children from families, we know it’s damaging in itself. We work hard to train and support carers but often people are stuck in their ways: as much as they might have successfully parented their own children those methods aren’t necessarily going to work with children who have experienced loss, trauma & abuse.

We care deeply about our children, we are invested in them and the outcomes we can try and achieve for them. It is always distressing when we realise carers are not offering them the home we’d expect them to.

Rhubarb - it's a good question. I'm not sure. I would imagine that at times, yes, it would be. But... a big problem I think they would have is that part of the reason the internal source thing works is a basic trust between the reporter and, at the very least, the PR person who is acting as source. And I'm not entirely sure that would be present between the royal family's PR people and the tabloid media.

In the corporate world, a big part of my ability to get the job done is a combination of being trusted by both the company and the journalist. It doesn't mean the journalist takes whatever I say as the gospel truth (not if they're a good reporter anyway - we all know that even if I believe I'm telling the truth, I might not have all the facts) but it is a starting point. My professional sense of how things work between the RF and media is that there is none of that trust there. I suspect (but obviously don't know) it's also why even if individual members of the RF try to apply strategies that might have worked for others (or i Meghan's case, her personal experience as an actor), it doesn't work in this context.

At its simplest, the reason I love and stick to corporate PR is I wouldn't have a clue how to navigate the tabloids.

bling. Would that source ever be Buckingham Palace?

A tour guide gets a cut, but it's in his interest to therefore be confident that the people he's introducing his clients to are going to be professional and provide a good service

I agree in principle, Bling, especially with the point about ensuring good service, but IME there's a time and place for introducing yet more "sales opportunities"

And trust me, a tour which already included plenty of them on arrival definitely wasn't it

I work in PR and Media (in the corporate world). When you read a story with lots of details attributed to a "source" while the company is declining to comment, there's an extremely high chance the source is the company itself but they can't be even to publicly comment or provide that information.

(I have been that source 1000s of times...? )

they weren't even discreet about handing the driver his cut when we stopped I have no problem with this and I think it's common and quite reassuring, in theory. A tour guide gets a cut, but it's in his interest to therefore be confident that the people he's introducing his clients to are going to be professional and provide a good service. Because if not, a) sales will be down for his partners, impacting his cut and b) if his partners piss his customers off, he's likely to lose out on tips, recommendations etc. So this mutual back scratching concept should work, done right.

I've been on the receivingg end of staff in travel and tourism who have no skin the game as it were and as such not only is service bad, but there's no interest in making good recommendations.

Although I totally agree with the waits.despite electronic delivery. It seems to be a regular excuse that it gets sent somewhere else before being sent down to local branch and I've had more go missing than handing over a piece of paper!

Don't most get their scripts sent straight to a pharmacy now? It's much safer especially when prescribing restricted drugs I would have thought?

used to work for a water/air treatment company.

I would advise you not to drink the tap water in any hotel, even if they tell you its safe. It may well have come from a tank and will have been sat there for god knows how long. It may also be filthy, and occasionally have a dead animal or two in it.

An easy way to tell if a tap is tank fed is to hold your thumb over it. If there's pressure, its probably mains. If not don't drink it.

If there Is pressure, and its mains fed, I still wouldn't necessarily drink it as often (especially large chain hotels!) the cold water was deemed to warm to be safe to drink. We would advise them on what they needed to do to lower this but they never did it.

Sometimes its unavoidable like in the height of summer, generally they can make changes to help,

Other places that were bad were, primary schools, hospitals and council buildings.

Also, duct work is restaurants is sometimes FILTHY. I had to write reports up on pictures and Christ on a bike it makes you never want to leave the comfort of your own home again!

I am also suspicious on tours in other countries when the bus driver stops at a shop/restaurant Because he is probably getting money from the business owner

I'd say there's no "probably" about it and sometimes you don't even have to wait for it to stop. While on a cruise I took a ship-organised trip to the pyramids, and they let the blasted sellers on the bus with us ... two and a half hours of incessant pestering and they weren't even discreet about handing the driver his cut when we stopped

@ballsdeep
It varies. One guy I know went on to have a LTR with his former student (they've been together about 15 years now). Another one left his wife and children for his PhD student.
Others just jump into bed with the next young woman they have power over.

I don't always know when students are sleeping with staff until afterwards (like after they've graduated), unless they're particularly vocal in class (and you overhear their conversations), or unless there's some kind of drama like a complaint. Usually it's just a bit of a "vibe" you get. So, generally, I don't know which students are sleeping with staff.
But, yes, it can be very difficult to deal with colleagues who I know are/have been sleeping with junior women (students or colleagues). The problem is that it's not easy to just refuse to work with someone and because the junior students/staff are adults and there's not a caring relationship (like there would be with teachers), it's a bit of a grey area in terms of power abuse/consent/coercion etc. If you make a point about abuse of power, it's turned around to look like you're just a massive prude.

@dirtydennis I wonder of any of them actually continue with their relationships or if they are just seedy older men lookinh for an easy time.
Do you find it difficult working and teaching people who you know have slept with lecturers /students?

@britnay honestly I'm not exaggerating about staffing levels in our local pharmacy-pharmacist, 2 more senior dispensers and 2 junior ones. Only one non-dispensing staff member who is handing out scripts and covering the other till for otc and toiletries purchases. In a village with a population of 4,500!!

@holidayshopping
I suppose they are the same people who decide on which people (is not them!) should be made redundant!?
Ha, yes exactly!! This layer of people enjoy doing "strategy" things and reviewing policies which seems to keep them busy for most of their time.

@Wordle
What would lead you to hate a student?
I've only hated a few students to be fair. One of them had sexually assaulted another student but was let off because his family had connections. Another one called me "ugly fat slut" on social media. Another one that I'm currently teaching is constantly undermining me, being disruptive, and laughing at me in class.
The others I don't hate but they annoy me immensely and I'll do the bare minimum for them. For example, emailing me at 6pm on Friday night then getting in a piss when I don't email back until Monday lunchtime; or not showing up to any classes them expecting very close support right before deadline day.

@ballsdeep
Has anything happened to the senior lecturers who have slept with their students? How did you find out? I find these types of relationships fascinating after reading Gabriel's inferno
I found out because it's just common knowledge, it can be the women or the men who say it - it's no particularly big secret.
These instances are often not reported.
PhD students or junior staff are too worried about the effect it might have on their careers to report it as being problematic. Undergraduate students have a mistaken belief that it'll somehow improve their grades and so don't report. Even when it has been reported and investigated, lecturers have been placed "on sabbatical" which is basically a year off teaching. I don't know of a single person who's been disciplined or fired. There's a reluctance on the part of senior management to come down too hard on these men because, well, senior management is mostly comprised of men who've most likely done similar

@Dirtydenis
Has anything happened to the senior lecturers who have slept with their students? How did you find out? I find these types of relationships fascinating after reading Gabriel's inferno 😂

@babyno5, @britnay has hit the nail on the head. If we weren't given so much paperwork, so little hours etc we could get prescriptions done in a few minutes really. There's just way too much going on! A pharmacist needs to do "services" each day, usually 4 or 5 so will spend half an hour or so with those patients, in which time, nothing can be checked!

I work in insurance. If you threaten to go to the press and cancel your policy, we actually don't care.

We have favourite students that we'll go above and beyond for but we also have those we absolutely hate that we'll do the bare minimum for

What would lead you to hate a student?

There is a huge layer of fat at universities which is just senior administrators sitting around in offices making jobs for themselves

Interesting! I suppose they are the same people who decide on which people (is not them!) should be made redundant!?

crosser you've made me well up describing what you do when patients die.

That's interesting, much less waste. I did once get someone else's specially ordered item (not prescription, just special thickening powder for reflux baby) because they had changed their mind and didn't bother to get it but by coincidence I came in asking about the same thing so they sold it to me

@Natsku

Sometimes we get sent prescriptions for just a few days worth of tablet (for example, if someone is on holiday and has forgotten their medication).
Sometime a person might just be prescribed an odd quantity of something, specific to their own needs (for example taking 17 tablets a week, instead of the usual multiples of 7).
"split" boxes (ie those that don't contain the full quantity) are pretty common in a pharmacy. They will get used to fulfill another prescription. Sometimes they get combined with another brand of the same item to fulfill a prescription.

We don't have a huge amount of wastage in terms of our commonly prescribed lines. Wastage is usually in the form of items that have been especially ordered for a particular patient, but either the doctor or the patient has changed their mind and not taken it - we can't usually return goods to our warehouse after a few working days.