DSP- Direct Support Professional, ie I work with people who can't live on their own and need assistance
When I started my job *in September 2021, I worked a week long training to prep me on restraints, OSHA, Abuse/Neglect, the whole 9 for what I would be responsible for.
They informed me during this week that it was my job to enforce rules, and frankly that I'd probably receive physical backlash from my clients.
A week ago they raised pay from 12.75 to 16 an hour, and have begun cracking down on what they deem as human rights violations against our clients. Let me remind you, they taught us we were enforcers.
A month ago via house meetings we were given basically a whole retcon on how we operate as supports in our clients lives. Not as enforcers, but as someone to assist prompting towards better choices, but ultimately still leaving decisions to our clients.
Two months ago I wrote an Incident Report(IR) which detailed how I warned a client I was going to pull their hand from the fridge(this is like 3 minutes into the incident), did it, and she hit me for it. Now, due to our pay increase, they're suddenly taking interest in ensuring the staff is acting properly. And I'd like to say being a DSP isn't black and white. You often have no time to properly react, and mistakes happen. However a commitee for human rights isn't going to understand that just by reading an IR. *Which they never properly trained us on writing
This has been my only mistake, and I learned from in after the retcon. This one tiny slip up in phrasing on my IR has now lead to me needing to take 7 hours of training on abuse/neglect, human rights, and proper restrictions(which I followed to the best of my abilities in that situation), all because they raised our pay and are now “cracking down” on staff issues.
One. Mistake. In a situation where I was trying to assist my client in being properly prepared for her program by not taking excess food. If they didn't care when I was being paid 12.75, I don't see why they should care now that I'm being paid 16. If the pay raise is why you've concerned yourself, you didn't care about the clients in the first place.
I'm fucking exhausted.
ETA, some details *