Background
The following is an interview for a Child Life Specialist. A child life specialist works with the children and the families of these children in healthcare settings and provides necessary assistance to them, thus helping them cope with health challenges, hospitalization and sometimes, disabilities.
Q: What is your role as a health care team member?
A: My role as a child life specialist involves working with children to provide them with the support they need when they are under medical attention. I also advise the family members about such children. These include the parents and the guardians on how to attend to the special needs of the children under health duress. Providing age appropriate preparation to those responsible for taking care of these children during their most needy moments is important for maintaining the stability of the child’s health, ensuring their medication needs are met and hygiene, alongside dietary needs are properly attended (Medical Science, 2020 ). In the cases of children with disabilities, I also play the role of guidance and counseling and provide them with the appropriate information on how to handle the social and academic needs of the child so that they live a normal life, like any other child without disability.
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Q: How do you define professionalism and how does professional responsibility influence your work?
A: In my opinion, professionalism is the conduct of the professional, their attitude and behavior in regards to their professional obligations. Once an individual attains the required and distinctive education, and have sworn to abide by the rules that define the particular profession, then they ought to live, act and speak in manners that reflect their new status ( Green, 2020) . My profession is one of the most sensitive in the healthcare spectrum because it involves dealing with individuals who cannot effectively and coherently communicate their needs and their passions. Neither can they describe what they want to be adjusted to suit them better. In my profession, I have to rely on the cognitive and emotional training to interpret the mental and physiological state of the child as defined by the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics (2018).
Professionalism influences my work in various degrees. For instance, I am responsible for ensuring that the emotional, physical and psychological needs of the child are met and to effect this, I have to keep in touch with the guardians of the child. I therefore have to designate specific persons to correspond with, maintain confidentiality and also ensure the child’s safety. I am also responsible for seeking legal actions in the events that the children under my care are threatened in any way. Due to sensitivity of my professional requirements, I am always engaged to my duties. I must therefore conduct myself in manners that reflect who I am to the children and various parents and guardians. The depth of my involvement with my profession is so deep that I have failed to distinguish between my personal and my professional life.
Q: Do you consider leaders in your organization stewards of health care? Why or Why not?
I do consider leaders whom I work with stewards of healthcare. This is because they support me in every way possible and ensure that I am at my optimal best every day. They also provide guidance and correction in respectful ways that does not conflict with my opinions on how I handle my healthcare responsibilities. As a professional, I have to work together with parents, family members, doctors and other specialists. The Child Life Foundation mandates that I provide interventions for emergency rooms, consult with families, coordinate entertainment and other recreation activities for recovering children provide therapeutic services alongside being a psychologist to the family and the child on matters related to the child. These duties may seem too much to handle at a glance, but with the cooperation with the leaders in my field, I get the necessary support that enables me, and many others like me, to accomplish all these and many more tasks. For these reasons, I consider the leaders in my field stewards to healthcare.
Q: Is it important to you that leaders exercise professional advocacy and authenticity as well as power and influence when working with colleagues? Why or why not?
It is important for leaders to exercise professional advocacy and authenticity as well as summon their power and influence when working with colleagues. As a professional in healthcare provision, our daily job requirements put us on busy schedules that sometimes we may even forget basic duties like signing in or out. Our leaders are the ones who understand these circumstances because, first, they have been part of the profession for considerable amount of time, and they can observe elements and challenges in the profession that we might be facing but unable to voice. Leaders should thus play the advocacy role, voicing our concerns, as well as exercising their duties and leaders. The later involves display of authority and power, but in our case, the leaders have learned to balance the two, and I find no problem whatsoever.
Summary and Impressions
From the interview, I have child life specialists require very high professional conducts to live up to the numerous duties entrusted to them. Similarly, providing care for children is very complicated and requires deeper understanding of cognitive aspects and greater collaboration with other professionals in the field. Leaders play an important role in advocating for the needs of these professionals. My impression is that the profession is one of the most important units of healthcare and should be supported by all means possible.
Interview 2
The following Interview between me and the supervisor at the emergency and critical care service.
Q: What is your role as a health care team member?
My roles as a supervisor at the emergency and critical care service are numerous but basically, I work in a fixed location to ensure that all emergency cases are attended to. Furthermore, I coordinate the team of nurses to provide care for critical patients away from facility. For these reasons, I must ensure that my team is properly staffed with competent members and the environment of work is fully equipped according to the professional standards ( Emergency Department Health Care Team, 2020 )
Q: How do you define professionalism and how does professional responsibility influence your work?
Professionalism is keeping up with the oaths of the profession and taking no compromises as long as one is on duty. All professionals thus must maintain high standards to make them distinct from other persons within the same environment. These standards include dressing, mannerism, language and the people they associate with.
In my work, professionalism is very crucial. In mishap may lead to loss of life and taking chances that have lower odds may lead to disaster. I must ensure that the teams I work with are at their best mentally, physically and emotionally and I always have substitutes in case of emergencies. The high expectations of professionalism that I have placed on my team are what ensure that the team is always able to handle the unpredictable scenarios that we are frequently faced with.
Q: Do you consider yourself a steward of health care? Why or Why not?
A: As a leader, I have always lived up to my professional demands and due to the satisfaction that my team has reported over the course of the period that I have worked here, I can confidently say that I am a steward in healthcare. I say this because I have observed that during the shifts that I am on duty, my staff members are always happy and our friendship has transcended professionalism. The lack of fear, that most leaders are associated with, makes our interactions mutual and full of professional respect.
Q: Is it important to you that leaders exercise professional advocacy and authenticity as well as power and influence when working with colleagues? Why or why not?
A: It is important that leaders play advocacy roles for their team members because the leaders are who connect the professionals at the lower levels to the larger professional body. They should also exercise their power and influence when working with colleagues to ensure that their team members adhere to the professional standards that is required.
Summary and Impressions
In summary, leadership positions demand authority as well as strict adherence to professional standards than other positions. My impression of the interview is that those in leadership are straightforward, brief and to the point.
Part 3:
Compare and contrast responses provided by your peer in part I with those provided by the leader. Share your impressions of their differences and similarities.
In comparison, the interviews both confirm that healthcare provision, professionalism is an important asset. Both interviews also confirm that leaders are important in providing advocacy and improving the welfare of those under them.
In contrast, the two respondents show different approaches in addressing their professional roles, with the first respondent unable to distinguish her professional from her personal life, expressing sentiments of overlapping interests. On the other hand, the second interview shows that the leaders have drawn a specific line between his professional life and personal life. He states that he holds his team members to professional standards only when they are on duty, but sets them free to be themselves away from duty. My impression is that the healthcare providers play different roles which are equally important to the health of the society. However, those who engage with patients directly have more professional demands that if they do not check, overlap with their personal lives.
References
Child Life Foundation Home. (2020). Retrieved 25 January 2020, from https://www.childlife.org/
Emergency Department Health Care Team. (2020). Retrieved 25 January 2020, from https://www.uwhealth.org/emergency/emergency-department-health-care-team/44726
Green, I. (2020). Child life specialist : Career Outlook: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved 25 January 2020, from https://www.bls.gov/careeroutlook/2018/youre-a-what/child-life-specialist.htm
Medical Science, (2020). Health Sciences Education. Retrieved 25 January 2020, from http://www.mayo.edu/mshs/childlife-career.html
