I am relocating to Happy Valley from the dark satanic mills of nether glooming and have been applying for numerous nursing posts in and around the region for the past three months. Yesterday I attended at Anytown for an interview with their crisis team; at least I thought I had. I only applied for the post two weeks ago so when the letter came through my door the other day inviting me for interview the day after tommorrow! I thought wow! That’s efficient. I should have realised that something was wrong when I saw that the interview was for the post of a Community Psychiatric Nurse but no mention was made on the letter of the team or the grade of the job so I thought hey ho CPN is a generic term for a psychiatric nurse who works in the community and that’s me so maybe that is what they call their crisis team workers over there, CPN’s.
So yesterday I drove 150 miles to Anytown for my interview. Something didn’t ring true when the first question was “What do you see as the principal differences between caring for someone on an acute psychiatric ward compared to caring for them in the community”, other questions followed about the role of the care coordinator and about the care planning approach in general which I thought was odd at the time because where I work the Crisis team do not generally take on the role of care coordinator. But hey ho thinks I different strokes for different folks if that is how they do it here I can live with that.
It wasn’t till we got to the end of the interview and any questions when I started asking if they covered the whole county and if they took referrals directly from GP’s or had them triaged by the CMHT’s as we do in my area that one of the interviewing panel said “We are the CMHT”……………………………………………………..
It was only then that the penny dropped. I had applied for a band 5 CPN post at Anytown CMHT over two months ago and it was this post I was being interviewed for not the crisis team job I had applied for two weeks ago. Oh how we laughed on the way back to the waiting room and the car park. “Did I wish to withdraw my application?” “Well not much point is there really” I had already done the interview hadn’y I.
After driving the 150 miles back home I fell to wondering. How is it possible to sit through a ¾ of an hour interview without any one (including me) noticing that I had turned up for the wrong interview? Surely the jobs are not that similar. Trouble is with the profusion of different teams being set up these days, CMHT’s, Crisis teams (CATT), Drug and or alcohol teams (CDAT), Assertive outreach (AO), Early intervention in psychosis team (EIP), Enhanced primary care teams(EPCT), all with their own brand of health worker, HCP, CPN Star worker, outreach worker, support team worker etc etc it is perhaps not surprising that this was going to cause confusion sooner or later and if a surgeon can get the wrong patient or the right patient but the wrong x ray or the right x ray but get it back to front and remove the wrong, kidney then hey mistakes happen. Just shows you should never take anything for granted.
Needless to say I didn’t get the job. Hey ho.
2 comments
April 18, 2008 at 4:52 pm
oldschoolbaby
Someone told me the other day that as part of my job description, as an acute ward staff nurse, I had responsibility for liaising with 32 ( yes, thirty two ) teams. I`m hoping one is Leeds United as I know, to the detriment of my health, what they do and where they based. As for the other 31, what they do and where they`re based I really haven`t a clue.
April 18, 2008 at 4:52 pm
zarathustra
After driving the 150 miles back home I fell to wondering. How is it possible to sit through a ¾ of an hour interview without any one (including me) noticing that I had turned up for the wrong interview? Surely the jobs are not that similar.
In all fairness, a lot of the skills between the different teams are pretty transferable. I wouldn’t say there’s necessarily a Crisis Team way and an Assertive Outreach Team way to talk to a psychotic patient, or to maintain confidentiality, or to built trust between yourself and the client.
They may be different teams with different remits, but at the end of the day the bulk of CPN skills are roughly the same wherever you are.
I suspect I may have opened a can of worms by saying that. Feel free to shoot me down in flames, you lot.