Social Work Spotlight - Episode 20: Candice

Episode Date: December 25, 2020

In this episode, Candice and I discuss her passion for ongoing learning and improving outcomes and opportunities for people living with a disability. Candice is the Professional Leader of Social Work at Royal Rehab and their inaugural sexuality services Team Leader. In addition to her Social Work Bachelor’s degree, Candice has completed a Master's in Public Health and post graduate studies in Sexual Health and Reproduction, specifically psychosexual therapy.Links to resources mentioned in this week’s episode:· Shane Clifton’s memoir ‘Husbands Should Not Break’ - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/26763199-husbands-should-not-break· Leigh Sales’ ‘Any Ordinary Day’ - https://www.penguin.com.au/books/any-ordinary-day-9781760893637· Sam Bloom’s ‘Heartache & Birdsong’ - http://www.penguinbloom.com· Alex McKinnon’s ‘Unbroken’ - https://www.betterreading.com.au/book/unbroken/· Mount Sinai Enhancement of Social Work Leadership Program - https://www.aasw.asn.au/document/item/11806· Royal Rehab, Sydney - https://royalrehab.com.au· Strength2Strength program, Royal Rehab - https://royalrehab.com.au/event/strength2strength-program-for-brain-injury-2· Candice’s ResearchGate page - https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Candice_Care-UngerThis episode's transcript can be viewed here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MsomIrPvI5G0O66HS7h-REkv0AOnKA3M/view?usp=sharingThanks to Kevin Macleod of incompetech.com for our theme music.

Hi and welcome to Social Work Spotlight where I showcase different areas of the profession each episode. I'm your host, Yasmaine McKee Wright, and today's guest is Candice. Candice completed her social work bachelor's degree from Sydney University in 2005, obtained a master's in public health in 2012, and postgraduate studies in sexual health and reproduction, specifically psychosexual therapy, also from the Sydney University in 2019. Candice is the professional leader of social work at Royal Rehab and their inaugural sexual services team leader. Candice lives and works in Sydney. She's also a mother, a wife, Annette Baller and pastor of a congregation with Community of Christ. She wears many hats, but today we are talking about social work, rehabilitation, sexuality, spirituality and Candice's passion for ongoing learning and improving outcomes and opportunities for people living with a disability.

Thank you so much, Candace, for coming onto the podcast. I'm very excited to chat with you about your work. Can I start by asking you when you first started as a social worker and what drew you to the profession? So I finished June 2005 with you as we just worked out. But what drew me to the profession, I actually remember the day I decided that I would enroll into social work. I used to work at a chicken shop. This is when I was at high school. and we were trying to put in our UAC guides,

and I had put in all primary school teaching, high school teaching. And there was a girl who was like a year older than me at the chicken shelf who had just got into uni and she was doing social work. I was like, oh, what social work? And she kind of gave me the spiel. I'm like, that sounds amazing. And so I went home that night and changed all primary school, high school applications to social work applications.

And then she dropped out within six months and I was still doing it. So I feel like it was, you know, kind of meant to be. It's been an absolutely satisfying career, like more than I ever would have expected, especially considering at 16 years old, I didn't have a clue what a social worker was. So what drew me to social worker was chance. Okay, but it sounds like it's been a good path for you. Was there anything in particular that interested you in working with people with a disability? Oh, okay, so my placement, I'll just back up a little bit.

So when we're at uni, I had my two placements. One was in homelessness and working with. with sex workers with it was like in Walmolu kind of area and we did like a we had like a drop in centre and so I love that I found it so interesting and the people I met were amazing and the social workers with was just fabulous so a little shout out to Dave McNair he was a wonderful supervisor but then I did my second placement with Anglicare Child and Family and whilst it was a very valuable learning time I realized I wanted to like take all the children home and that kind of set me up for not wanting to work

child protection. I'll probably become a foster carer because that is a better fit for being able to bring people home. So I guess it was more of like a process of elimination around the things that was going to be a good fit for me sustainably and what was definitely not. And my very first job at a uni was in workers' comp as a case manager. And I did like the Bunnings and BBC hardware portfolio. And I didn't last very long, maybe 14 weeks because I hated it. But what I did learn through it was how much the physical and the psychological and emotional and the spiritual were all interconnected. And I hadn't really appreciated that even a broken leg or a rotator cuff injury or something

that I would maybe say is short-term manageable sort of injuries would have these massive impacts in people's psychosocial lives. And just kind of realizing this light bulb moment going, the physical and the psychosocial are interconnected. And then my next job after that was in spinal foot injury. And I just fell in love with that whole area of disability and rehab in particular and thought I could be passionately committed to this space. And I've never wanted to like bring people home. So there's like, you know, the safety in terms of having a sustainable career and having some decent boundaries.

Yeah, fantastic. It's great that you could recognise that at a very early point in your career. And you've had the opportunity to work overseas as well. Can you tell me about that? I have. Yeah, sure. So I, like I said, my first proper social work job that I was thriving and happy in was with the paraplegic and quadriplegic association. It was called Paracord, New South Wales.

So I started out there and then I did some work up in Queensland for the spinal unit in Brisbane. And then I'd come back to Royal Rehab, which is where I am now in Sydney, and had been with them for a couple of years. And I had always wanted to do the gap year. You know, the very popular under 30s, Australians go behave well in the UK. And I think the lady who managed me at the time, I'd said that I'd always wanted to work overseas. One of the physios that I worked at the time had done a few years in Scotland, and Scotland had been my desirable destination. And we were doing motivational interviewing workshops,

and as the physio and I got partnered up together, and you had to talk about something that you were ambivalent about and so where she could practice her skills. And so I was ambivalent about during my gap year and kind of going and working overseas. And by the end of that, she totally talked to me into it. I'm like, you're an amazing motivational interviewer. And I am now going to Scotland. Sorry, team, I'm leaving.

Incredible. I was very, very lucky to have a very supportive manager at the time. He said, you should. Like, it's good personal development. It's good professional development. We'll give you 12 months leave without pay. Go fly your wings, learn new things, and come back to us. So I did.

And I was forever grateful that she was willing to, you know, give me the security to like go but also know that I could always come back. So yeah, I worked in Scotland for the year as a social worker and did different staff, community health staff, and managed to find myself into a job that would pay me full time in four days. So I was able to do the long weekends away, travelled more than 50 countries. So yeah, I kind of got to tick all the boxes for personal and professional development and then came back, very settled and very happy to be back. Did you notice much in the way of differences between social work here and in the UK? Many, many, many. But if we just drill down to spinal injury, I went and spent a little

bit of time at the Glasgow spinal unit. And the one thing that I remember still now, and this is a long time ago, this was like early 2010, 2011, there were signs everywhere saying visiting hours are after 5pm, therapy hours are between 9 and 5 kind of thing, and, you know, families to respect visiting hours and not visit between these hours. And that was at the time that I'd been working, before I had gone to Scotland, I'd been working on the Family Resilience Program, the Strength Program, where we'd been spending all of our time talking about how to integrate families into rehab, how to build partnerships between families and health professionals

and the person with the injury. And it was like culturally chalk and cheese, you know, here we are trying to create these environments. Family-focused rehab was this whole thing that we were talking about. You know, how do we make sure that even the kids understand what's happening and they're part of, you know, mum or dad's injury and their rehab And then I went to the UK and it was like, what? You don't let the family's in here before five?

Where do they learn? How does everyone adjust? Like it was just mind-blowing. And then the other thing in the gym, they had this half a car. And the half-car was there to learn car transfers. Because if you waited for a sunny day to do a car transfer, you'd never learn how to do a car transfer. So I just thought, oh, there's some environmental differences.

Yeah, for sure. And then when you came back to Sydney, you completed some additional qualifications. Yeah. So I went back to uni when I got back. and did my master's in public health. So that I was interested in. You know, you see the issues for Tom, Sam, Fred, John, and eventually you kind of go, surely we can do something that will affect and benefit all of those people without having to do the same thing again and again. So public health just seemed like the right fit for me to be able to take that sort of broader umbrella,

bird's eye view at health issues, looking at health economics. Like I never would have thought I would have been interested in that, but I was. And looking at epidemiology, biostatistics, that kind of, you know, understanding health advocacy. And I loved all of the health advocacy, public health subjects in terms of, you know, like how does law and taxation change health, like tobacco, for example. So how do we address a health issue through environmental and social and political change? And, yeah, so it was a good degree.

I was very pleased I did it. I didn't really know what I wanted to do with it. And I think it was like a nice rounding out for the thinking that I had been wanting to develop, but I didn't necessarily, I didn't picture myself going and becoming an epidemiologist and going onto the cruise ship to find the dodgy oyster. You know, I found all of that really interesting, but I didn't see myself moving out of social work. It was more to try and help broaden my social work, thinking to bridge the gap into public health space. And I imagine you would have gotten more out of that than if you had gone into that straight-up.

out of undergrad, having had all that practical experience that you could then apply to. Yeah, of course. And then you've done qualifications in sexual health and reproductive health? Yeah. Yeah, so that was just last year that I went back in 2019 for the postgraduate program in sexual health and reproduction in psychosexual therapy. So that was at Sydney University again. So I have definitely given them a lot of money with an undergrad, a master's and a postgrad.

So, you know, I should get shares in Sydney Union or something. It was a fantastic degree. Like if ever somebody was thinking, oh, I'm really interested in sexual health and counselling and the psychosexual therapy space, there's only two universities that do this type of specialisation, Sydney's one and overt curtain is the other. But yeah, we're lucky if you live in Sydney, it's here on your doorstep. And what would a typical day be like for you? What's your current role?

Oh, my. Is there a typical day? No. No, there is no typical day. If you had asked me six months ago, it would be a totally different job, but coronavirus has really changed what it is that I've been doing lately. And then in six months from now, I'm transitioning into something else. So the short version, at the moment, I am the professional leader of social work at Royal Rehab.

I look after our lovely team of social workers there. 16 plus and casuals, so about 20 of us all up together. Very skilled, brilliant group of highly specialized, very passionate and very committed, competent, capable, confident clinicians. So absolute thrill to be there, a professional leader, but I am also in the middle of transitioning into psychosexual therapy role

within raw rehab as we expand our sexuality services over the next few months. So kind of, am for the first time maybe stepping a little bit sideways from a traditional health social work job, but I still see psychosexual therapy as like a specialisation of social work. It's a very specific area of health,

but it's, absolutely utilising all of your social work skills. So whilst I will step away from being the PL for the next 12 months, still in the organisation, so that's why I said it was kind of a bit of a hard question to answer there because before coronavirus, I predominantly was just working clinically in the community with people who either had a sparticle injury or a brain injury and their families. But due to what's happened the last few months in our world, I've moved back onto the ward just to help. We had a big change in our kind of case mix and trying to help out with the local health district. So I just needed all hands

on deck. So I kind of got a bit redeployed into a very practical back on the grassroots job. It's been good fun. You know, social work is like riding a bike. You don't lose those skills. You just maybe need to brush up a little bit on how some of the services have changed around us. But like I said, we've got a great team. So we've just sort of got through it together. And here we are in October. I feel like the year has just blinked. Yep. Absolutely has. But it sounds as though there's so much opportunity to work. with other disciplines and especially the interdisciplinary research that you've been doing. Yeah.

And it sounds as though that's a really nice translation of research transforming practice in the sense that you've been able to create this whole new service within Royal Rehab. Yeah. And that, you know, we had that experience with the Strength and Strength and Strength Program as well in terms of that originally started out as a pilot project. And that was 11, 12 years ago now, 2009. And then you go, wow, that's like standard care now. So you can kind of see how we moved from that pilot program.

project. It's a really good case example of knowledge translation into practice because you start out with your pilot. We did our evaluation and then we did some training and it's just kind of through lots of hard work. I'm not going to pretend like it happened by magic. Lots of commitment and lots of very strategic leadership around how does this intervention fit within our model of care and how do we prioritize interventions with families as social workers and juggle that balance of group work on top of clinical work. But 11 years later, we now have a very smooth system for how that works and a great training program, mentoring program, sustainability. So it's my public health kind of approach to just like an intervention for

social work. Yeah, maybe that's a good segue then. So the strength to strength program is about building family resilience and looking at shared lived experience with disability. Can you tell us more about that program and what it looks like now versus when you set out to create it? So I was part of a bigger research team, which is led by Graham Simpson. He's over at the Inhuman Institute, at Liverpool. And the research team included six other social records across, you know, Prince of Wales, Westmead, Royal Rehab and out at Bathurst. And so originally started out as a pilot. Like we did lots of focus groups.

My colleague, Kate and Graham had done some empirical. studies before that as well. And so then when we did the focus groups, we're kind of trying to look for the families that, you know, we're doing well, how are they doing well? What are they doing? What can others learn? And kind of drawing that lived experience of families that had come before. And then adopting that into the research and the theory and there's like multiple, it's a very eclectic, but multiple different theories that underpin the program. And you could come to the training if one was so interested. So we run that, we run like a train-the-trainer every year

if people want to learn how to deliver the strength-the-strength program. But it's pretty much a five-session two-hour intervention program. It's the full program, so 10 hours over five weeks, or a one-day abbreviated version, which we use mostly in the community. And that's like a kind of six-hour intervention over the one day. Yeah. Yeah.

And are you still delivering that interstate, or is it only Sydney for now? Yeah, we are doing interstate. So Graham and I actually just did online training for South Australia because we couldn't go there and it worked really well. Like it was great. We had some awesome social workers in South Australia on the ground who have run the groups in the past

because we had done the training down there maybe 2015. So it was like a second time doing the training. So some of those people that had done the training and had also been delivering the groups for the last five years were the on-site trainers. and then we were online kind of with the more theoretical parts of the program. And it was this beautiful, blended, online, face-to-face pilot. Like, we haven't done like that before.

And then at the moment, just last week, we started Strength to Strength on Pexit, which is like the New South Wales Health Telehealth platform. So we're doing like an online group for the first time. So we did the full program, 10 hours, the abbreviated program, which is the one-day program. We have a telephone version, which is 5.1. and a half hour sessions, which was done originally in rural New South Wales and the Bathurst brain injury team did the evaluation of that. And now we're using the same protocol of the telephone but on Pexham. So we're in the middle of evaluating that at the moment too to kind of just make sure

that families find that unacceptable and also that's a feasible way of delivering strength to strength. And COVID helped us, you know, become a little bit more innovative rather than everyone coming to a centre or to a room. Yeah, we had two people from Canberra on the group. because they could be on the group. I think it's going to really open up some options for people that are a bit more geographically spread out. Are there plans to roll it out to other states then? The training was delivered in Queensland last year,

and so they used it up there. South Australia use it already. So it kind of already has. There's a big randomized control trial happening in the US at the moment that Graham was involved with the training and we will have results from that over the next couple of years. But yeah, so there's lots of little things happening around the world, around the state around New South Wales.

So it's used across most of the brain injury programs in New South Wales and the spinal services. That's really exciting. Yeah, that's cool. What would you say you love most about your job? I just find people interesting and really enjoy meeting new people and hearing their stories and the utter privilege of being with them during this very traumatic and life-changing time. So it's a combination of being able to share in that and also. be useful in that, I think is a privilege. And then the other part of my job I love is I love

working as social workers and also our students, we've got a really good teaching program at our hospital that, again, we've worked hard to develop, it didn't just happen overnight, but last year we had 11 social work students. So if you think about, you know, our student to staff ratio, we've got a pretty sweet model happening right now. And just, you know, they're kind of, their social work identities are emerging and they're trying to work out what type of area of social work they want to work in and watching their little minds expand and grow as they transition from being student to clinician. We've got a pretty robust new grad training program as well. So we once every two years employ a new graduate. It's like a really supported, nurtured transition

into the workforce. So I think all of those parts of like, you know, growing and developing social workers is also one of the things I love about the job. What do you think you find most challenging them. Just acknowledging the things that are outside of your control, you know, external agencies who change their desires or their eligibility or their processing times are so bloody slow. Or policy, legislating. Yeah, that kind of stuff. Just when you feel like you're in trickle, you're just running and you're not getting anywhere.

And that's more around like that systemic navigation. And I was finding that. That was probably the bit that I was getting like annoyed at or fatigue. with as a clinician that probably made me realize, or maybe I'm ready for like the next kind of step, like instead of battling housing and battling Centrelink and battling the NDIS or, you know, you just kind of go, you know what,

maybe I need to stop the battle. And part of that is moving more into the parts of social rec that I really love and that I thrive in. And so like the therapy space, for example, I don't have to battle housing and Centrelink when we're talking about sex. that's kind of out of scope now and that's good but I also see the role of social work is so important in all of those the advocacy the systemic navigation it's a vital role

particularly within discharge planning as well in the hospital setting so I am very grateful to the many social workers who still love that and find that challenging and I love that when I started out it just kind of got tired of it and instead of getting burnout in the profession I just meant you know what the bit I don't like is just this bit And so I can remove that bit and focus on the parts of the job that I love. And it's okay. It's going to be kind of insightful in terms of where are the pain points and what can you do about the pain points in terms of whether you just accept them for what

they are or you change your job to maybe not have to engage in them all the time. And it sounds like it's allowed you to develop further that passion and that skill, the expertise in leadership as well, which is really exciting. able to support the people who are doing all of that nitty-gritty, the advocacy stuff and the discharge planning, because you've been there, you've done that, you've got the experience, and it helps to have that person who's kind of sitting slightly outside of it all to be able to go, I think this could be done differently or even stepping in where you think someone else externally has gone a bit too far. Yeah, yeah. And like, I did it for 15 years, but I'm still doing

it now. But the question was, what are the challenges? And that's the challenge. So it is what it is as well, you know. So sometimes you're going to say, you know, we live in Australia. This is our current systemic setup. So we've got to work within it. I'm not planning to go and become a politician. But that doesn't mean that I can't still advocate for change when and where we have opportunity to influence. It's just also acknowledging that some things just are as they are and some things are in their infancy. Like I remember, like I've been around long enough that when I get started, it was like, oh, man, this is painful. And then all of a sudden, a couple of years later it was like oh this is pretty good and now you go okay now it functions hopefully and so you just

kind of have to roll with it and i feel like that's probably where we're at with the indias like it's early days they're still finding their feet but because i've lived through the evolution of other systems that have now settled kind of still gives me the hope that we'll get there what changes then have you seen over time in this field specifically for social work because you've been part of so many changes I'm just keen to see from your perspective where you think social work has developed and how it's developed. There's been so many systemic changes since I became a social worker. Things like ICA didn't exist, NDIS didn't exist. We had this old system of the attending care program and none of them exist anymore.

So there's like been lots of systemic change. When I first started becoming the professional leader for the social workers, I probably had like four generations in the team at one time. And I remember sitting with one of our more senior staff and her just came saying, I feel like all of the confidence I had to do my job has just been taken out from underneath me because the entire system that had evolved with her had changed

and suddenly it was like the NDAS had rolled out and she's like, I don't have the energy anymore. It was almost like that was kind of the time for her to retire was when she said, I just don't want to learn another system and I don't want to fight the fight again. And she was 74. So it was appropriate life stage to say, actually, I'm done. And I've had a great career, but the system's changing and I'm done.

So I think I've seen lots and lots of systemic change and lots of change in terms of what's available to people with spinal injury in terms of that assistive tech role. Like, well, rehabs just brought these two exoskeletons. And like how exciting for the robotic space I was in the US two years ago and they were using exoskeletons on the ward then. And I knew, I was like, this is like coming to Australia. It's got so much cool energy about it. but we're just a little bit behind the US. And now here we are two years later. So I kind of feel like, oh, there we go.

That's like a big, big change in rehab is the introduction of robotics and kind of that whole assistive tech space. Just looking at sex, I mean, that's changed significantly over the last couple of years between something that wasn't really addressed to ad hocly addressed to things like NDIS having provisions to actually talk about psychosexual therapy being funded, all of the debate and administrative appeals tribunals and everything looking at the use of sex work with the NDIS funding.

So that whole conversation around sex and disability has changed in my working time. And in terms of other social work, I think our role has expanded into case management. It's expanded into other roles within the hospital. There's opportunities within the fee-for-service space, the private space that weren't around. when I was a new grad. So yeah, lots and lots of change. And it sounds like with each of those changes, there's more opportunity for social work. There are more ways that we can kind of dig

ourselves into an area and knuckle down similar to what you've done and take that pocket of what you feel like you're really, really passionate about or really, really good at doing and just make that all you do, which is really cool. Are there any other areas of social work that interests you, given that you've spent most of your time in disability and stuff? spinal cord injury and TBI, what else might you be interested in doing if you had the opportunity? I think, like, sexual health is probably the only other thing at the moment that has perked my interest. And maybe it's, like, just taboo areas, like stuff that people, where society has maybe gone a bit scared. If I wasn't a social worker, I'd probably be, like, a funeral director, maybe.

Or, like, kind of something in that death and dying space. I'm also a minister. That's, like, for my other. So I've done lots of weddings and the sacraments. And so I think I'd probably be comfortable in like, you know, conducting funnels and stuff of that. And using all of my empathic grief loss work in a different context or a florist. That's like, you know, when you have a bad day, you're like, oh man, why don't I become a florist? That would have been so much easier. And then my colleagues were like, yeah, but you'd have to get to the markets at like 4 a.m. I'm like, true. Okay. Happy to be a social worker. So I mean, you've got to have like, everyone has that alternative career that you maybe daydream about, like, oh, what that slighting

dog life being like. But I'm not a morning person. I'd be much better in the evening. But other areas of social, like I said, I find people fundamentally interesting. I think, like I look at jobs all the time, at least once or twice a week. And part of that is because I like to see what's out there and I like to see how people wear their ads and, you know, kind of makes me reflect on how we recruit social records to our hospital because if there's like really, if I see something really cool, I'm like,

yeah, that's like a good way of advertising that or recruiting the right person. So I'm always looking at ads. And also it gives you a chance to see what's happening like in the sector, you know, and what jobs pop up a lot and you kind of go, oh, it's going on over there. Or what jobs are you learn about a new service because of advertising a job and you think, wow, that's a really interesting job. What service is that? And then you go down the rabbit hole of learning about something totally new.

So I think I would probably do many things and find them interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Is there any other form of social work that you really wouldn't want to do? I don't know. I just say never say never. A while ago I was like I would never do offenders work. Like sexual offender's work is not for me.

And then I met someone with a disability who'd offended. And I was like, well, actually they need help. You know, okay, suddenly I'm doing a type of offenders work that I hadn't planned to do, but was trying to like link them with offender programs, but also bridge that gap, the disability part, that the offenders program was like, oh, we don't really work with people with disability. And I'm like, and I don't really work with offenders. So we've got to find our middle ground here, you know, like, we can't just leave this person to continue offending and have a fast track to prison.

So, yeah, I never say never because you don't really know what's going to come onto your desk. And if you just keep an open heart and be compassionate, then you probably will find yourself doing something that you can do that you didn't think you could do. But I finished uni. I did a like a three, four month volunteer program and you could like tick all the countries that you were happy to go to. And I'd said to my parents, I'll go anywhere, just not India. And then, of course, the offer I got was India. And I was like, well, okay, I'll go to India.

I spent four months in India. I loved it. It was the best. I don't know. Like, so I just really try hard not to say, I'd never do blah, blah, blah. Because sometimes you go where you're meant to go and you learn what you meant to learn. And it's probably out of your comfort zone. And it was probably where you said, I'd never go, blah, blah, blah.

And you have an amazing learning growth opportunity. so I just see what comes my way. And who was the volunteer program through? It was with World Service Corps, so it was connected with the community of Christ, which is the church I'm involved with. Amazing. And is that open to other people?

It's open to young adults of the church. So the program I was linked with, funnily enough, was a social worker. And I think that's probably why they sent me there because my graduate degree was social work and then the host site, it was full women in India. escaping domestic violence and I was totally naive working with women who'd been burnt with acid

and set on fire and I was like I'd never seen anything like that so big learning I also did some work with they called it an orphanage but it wasn't like how I had always understood orphanages to be like the majority of those people had families their families just couldn't afford to feed them raise them them educate them but because they went to the orphanage they got education food and accommodation So there was still this kinship relationship, families were visiting on weekends. It's more of an issue of poverty than an issue of being an orphan. And so I think that also kind of opened my eyes to like inter-country adoption, for example, where I'm like, I'm not keen on that, but that's because I've seen a different side of what orphanages are in a developing country.

And, you know, to just pluck somebody out of their culture, their language, their potential to have relationships with their relatives. I just, I think it's, it's a grey area that I had made some presumptions and assumptions about until I went and learnt a lot. And it really made me reflect on things like inter-country adoption. You've had some really, really incredible opportunities. It's been pretty amazing. Yeah, you just say yes and go with it and be a little comfortable and the uncomfortable. And I think sociality can open up many doors for people. Yeah, we're always sitting with discomfort.

I guess it's just a different degree of it. And if you're willing to do it for your own life. Mm-hmm. Yeah. You've already mentioned the Strength to Strength Program. Can you tell me about other projects or programs you're working on at the moment? Got quite a few sexuality things in the background are about to start looking at the experience of women after spinal injury. So their experience of sexuality.

So that's kind of on the wings. We're just working on our protocol for that at the moment. One of the projects that we've been working on at Royal Rehab is a, It's a spirituality staff training program. So my colleague, Dr. Kate Jones, who's over at Notre Dame University, she had done her PhD whilst she was a social worker at Royal Rehab, looking at spirituality's contribution to resilience and family resilience after spinal injury. And I remember we sat down for lunch after she'd finish her degree.

I was like, you know, what are you going to do next? And she's like, oh, I guess I'll go back to the ward. And I was PL at this point. And I was like, oh, what would you want to do next? like, you know, if money wasn't the issue, like, and she's like, oh, that's a different question. Then we kind of started talking about her work, what the outcomes from her PhD were and where she felt the gaps had been.

Because, I mean, she just spent the last four or five years conducting this amazing study with our patient population and had outcomes and sort of like, share them, baby. Let us hear what you've got to say. And she's like, look, we know that spirituality contributes to resilience. And yet we don't really do it that well. And I was like, oh, tell me more. like if we were doing it well, what we're doing it well look like. So that's kind of how the conversation started.

Simultaneously, I'm a pastor in a congregation that is very fortunate enough to have an income stream because Montessori rent the building out. And so it's like one of those congregations that are time poor, asset rich, looking to make a contribution to society that's meaningful. So the leadership team at the church, we're kind of talking about what are our opportunities for the year? like how can we reflect that sort of peace church that we want to be. But all of us have got jobs.

We've got other stuff we need to be doing like Monday to Friday. And you know what? We don't have to be the ones that do it. So let's partner with people who know what they're doing and share our resources and really get bang for bark. So that conversation is happening at the church. Meanwhile, I'm having lunch with my colleague. And I was kind of like, I think this is a divine intervention. And I believe in that stuff.

So that's okay. Kind of floating it at the church. Like how would you feel about maybe sponsoring an intervention and research project over at the hospital and they were like oh that'd be totally different like we're just giving away money it's like yeah we would it's like a grant and they're like oh we've never done that before so it was like there was interest but it was new space and then also at the same time at work kind of being like oh how would you feel if we got some grant money to maybe do some spirituality research and like kate kind of do some of the implementation from a PhD and then we're like oh you want to just

give us some money okay I'm like okay I know I have a conflict of interest here so let's just put it out the table for everybody and it was this really healthy dialogue of I'm just the person who's introducing people I know that there's a need over here and I know that there's a desire to help over there and introduction made so that's kind of how it started and the project has been amazing so Kate was the project officer in that lots of focus groups lots of conversations with staff surveys with staff across both Royal rehab and the rehabilitation nurses network so we've got some peer-review published journals that you might want to read about both the survey, which I was looking at staff's confidence, competence, comfort level, talking about spirituality, which, you know, unanimously

came back saying, we know it's important, but oh my God, I don't feel equipped or ready to do anything about it. And surely it's somebody's job, oh, maybe it's my job, maybe it's somebody else's job. If it was my job, I would really need some help to be able to do it better. And that's kind of how we landed with a training program. And we interviewed a whole heap of previous patients that have come through both spinal foot injury and brain injury about what does spirituality mean to them, how they would have wanted it to be incorporated into their rehab. And so it's a one hour online module that they do before they come to the one and a half hour workshop. And so the team at Royal Rehab, both brain injury and spinal unit staff have come through the training. And then

there was like pre-measures, measuring their comfort, confidence and competence and looking at their post measures and then the follow-up measures and astronomically like their comfort level just their broader understanding of spirituality and kind of how that even fit in rehab and we're talking about existential crisis issues we're talking about making meaning out of a traumatic injury these are issues that fit comfortably within the spiritual space but maybe we just weren't really ready to share that vocabulary. And so what the training did was gave us a shared vocabulary for how to talk about spirituality, how to introduce it with patients. So the one-and-half-hour workshop that people come to after they've done the online module includes role play. We provide a framework for how to talk

about spirituality and how to do like an assessment in terms of looking for spiritual need in rehab. And then lots of role play, lots of role play, which is good because it's that kind of skills acquisition piece that we can read and we can have knowledge acquisition, but until we actually practice it, give it a go. That's where the skills acquisition happens. So that's been big for us. That was probably about two years worth of work, a really productive research team. And then Kate is now, she's moved on to Notre Dame University, doing some amazing stuff with St Vincent's Hospital and Notre Dame too. So I feel like it was a good win for her in her career. Great for Royal Rehab in terms of staff development and it's really positioned us as leaders in this space, like spirituality and

rehab and very satisfied community of Christ members who felt like their money actually helped and was useful and was used in a way that can alleviate distress in the community. So it kind of comes back to that whole thing of churches don't have to do it. They just need a part of people who know what they're doing. Absolutely. That sounds as though that was tailored to the people with a disability, but I wonder what the impact might have been for the professionals that were supporting them and how that impacted potentially on them personally.

professionally. So we did qualitative study as well, which I think it's out in November. I'll tag you when the journal comes out, which was the qualitative interviews where people kind of reflected on how to change their practice, broaden their thinking, their personal reflections, what they took from the training, both personally, professionally. And yeah, so you're right. Like there's the impact on skills and knowledge and confidence, and there's also an impact on people's ability to think more broadly about this and to kind of really go yeah you know what this is important and and it's kind of like on the radar in a really tangible way for some it was like hey we used to do this like the nurses who came through their nursing training you know back when it was like a in-hospital

model they were like we used to do this this was like nursing 101 in the middle of the night but we just kind of forgotten about it or you know in the as the years have gone by and we've become a little bit more focused on other things it's kind of dropped off the radar so for some it was like, this is a beautiful refresher. And like the rec therapists were like, this is exactly what we do. It's about meaning and purpose and recreation and life. And of course, like if people are connected to the bush, we should be taking them. You know, if their spiritual expression is looking at the ocean or going for a surf or, you know, that's us.

Yeah, we fit in this space. So it was really like a proper multidisciplinary team program that just all of us, you know, the other physio in the gym or the nurse in the night, you've got a role. for this. It's not to save your spiritual distress for the social worker who's going to do the psychosocial assessment or quick ring the chaplain. It's actually the whole MDT. We've all got a role. If you think about our very beginnings in social work, so much of the work would have been spirituality-based. I don't remember having gone through much of that at all in my social work training. It was barely mentioned. I just feel like it didn't come up. And if it came up, it was kind of just an

off-the-cuff comment or we won't really encourage to reflect on what we as people bring to and what our background and what our, maybe what our values are a little bit, but who we are as people and how that impacts on our ability to support people. And I just feel like that's a lovely opportunity, not just for social workers obviously, but for all allied health to reflect on what they bring personally because it's not just about spirituality. I'm guessing when you get really down to it and you get part of that training program, you really see that, no, actually I as a person have something to contribute to helping this person through their journey. And spirituality might just give them a language to use in that conversation. It's about going deeper. And you know,

we can all do a surface, polite, physical interventions. But, well, yeah, what we're talking about here is connection on that human to human level of, in your welfare resides my welfare. And if we've got a whole demographic of people with a disability who are traumatized and unsupported, then it doesn't help our society and it doesn't help us. So I kind of think, you know, we're in this together in your struggles. I can kind of share in that and kind of being vulnerable to say, life's messy and we're part of this together and it's okay to be in this space of uncertainty, of sadness, of hope. Yeah, that's kind of the point of coming into rehab.

one of my very brilliant colleagues who says, why do we wait until we're dying to talk about existential issues? Rehab is the perfect time to be talking about existential issues. We're talking about traumatic change or life change.

Every domain of somebody's life is affected after traumatic injury. So let's talk the existential issues now and make meaning of this and find purpose through this. And part of that, if we really do think about us that bias like a social spiritual model where emotional, spiritual, intellectual,

physical people, sexual people, beings who all have needs that are up for assistance in the rehab setting. So, yeah, that's kind of where we've been coming from on that project. You've done a bit of work on talking to children about disability. How has that come about? And what do you find in the process of doing that in terms of how it supports the person with an injury? I think everything comes about because it falls upon your desk.

And you go, this is something new. What will I do with this? That's like how sexuality came about for me too. So you go, oh, here's a problem, the family of, and I had three families in a row who had teenage pregnancies. And I was like, what are we doing where the 16, 17 year olds are getting pregnant? And it was that real, you know, mum or dad is injured. The other relative, like the other parent is so busy at the hospital. that these like, you know, 16, 17, 17 year olds are very unsupervised, also quite traumatised.

And we're sort of like really looking for intimacy and connection and wristaking and they're underdeveloped frontal lobes. We're making poor judgments. And I was like, wow, I'm just like, my caseload is certainly now including teenage pregnancy. I think there's a piece here that we're all missing. And it's the kids, whether they're 16 year olds or they're five-year-olds, we're just, I just kind of remember thinking, oh, this isn't quite working well.

And how do we talk about what's happened? So that way the kids at whatever age, like at age appropriately, feel part of this. Because, you know, we don't really want to just be sending mum or dad home with this new injury and they've not really been part of any of it. You know, I've worked in the rural program for over 10 years. So I was kind of flying out to these rural parts of New South Wales and meeting people who had had these long rehab stays in Sydney really maybe had seen their family a handful of times because of geography and reality.

and then they're coming home. And, like, they're all kind of saying, settling back in at home was really hard. Everyone had got used to me not being there. And then I'm back. And now we're trying to rearrange the entire family system around me. And they've changed and I've changed. And we're trying to get to know each other again. And there's just a lot of the first six weeks at home we know are the hardest.

And then they settled down. But I guess just acknowledging that what work could we have done to have prepared those families better? That's kind of how it came about. So then we interviewed a whole heap of families about, How did you talk to your kids about your injury? What did you? It was really peer-led, you know? What advice do you have for somebody else who has a kid at your age?

We partnered up with the pediatric team. So that way they actually know a lot about working with children. And so it was like the pediatric spinal service, our service, not sure. Yeah, this kind of spinal network that includes Prince of Wales as well. So the social workers within the spinal network meet like a special interest group. And we kind of look like, this is a theme across all of those. us like how do you prepare your kids to come into ICU and how do you prepare your kids to come onto the wards and how do you guys prepare your families to go home for weekend leave and so there's a lot

of like practice wisdom that had come from the group a lot of peer voices we ended up writing a guide like talking to children about spinal injury a guide for families so it kind of had lots of practical advice that other families had used full of quotes all of the actual interventions are evidence based from the paediatrics team and then practice wisdom from all the social workers who have been you know family by family making it work and doing the best we could so yeah that came out a couple years ago it probably came out like 2012 but it's like being used I get random emails all the time from people from other countries be like oh do you mind if we translate this into swahili like no you can do that that's fine have a good time oh hi we found this we're like from the jordanian

rehab hospital. Do you mind if we use, no, go for it, have a good time. But it's like, it's kind of nice. You know, the UK use it, like Canada use it. I've had lots of people make contact over the years because it's like free available PDF on the ACI website. We do this stuff to let people benefit from it. So if you want to translate it and I always just say, send me a copy when it's translated. So then we have that translation here. Yeah, yeah. Oh, that's incredible. And if people want to know more about the type of social work that you do or the area that you work in, where would you direct? Obviously, you've got your website that has some information on there about the programs

that you're running, but... Like the Royal Rehab website? Yeah, if they wanted to read a bit more about, or if, I don't know, any videos that they can download about the types of topics that you've discussed. I guess the thing I'm thinking about now at the moment is, like, patient autobiographies that cover this stuff. There's this great book, Shanklifting Road. what husbands should not break.

So if ever you wanted to just like read a lived experience, and he addresses things about spirituality and that, and he talks about grief and loss and sex and family and coming home, like it's all in that. Very generous and open and brilliant writer. So I kind of, I tend to like, you know, when you get a student and they start and they're like, oh, I totally overwhelmed.

Like, what am I meant to do here? I always just start them off with the patient autobiographies. And I say, you know, read Penguin Bloom, read. the husband shouldn't break. I said them to like even some stuff like any ordinary day, like Lee Sales book, just to try and help people understand that trauma happens. People work their way through it. Everyone has a different way and story,

but by kind of reading the patient autobiographies, they can get a bit more of a grounded understanding of the type of issues we're working with and the type of people that we're working with, rather than like a peer review journal, which they'll fall asleep halfway through. probably not you finish reading. And I'll just read the abstract and say, oh, I saw you wrote that thing. And I'll be like, yeah, you didn't read it.

But so, yeah, I send people to patient autobiographies. Oh, like Alex McKinnon's one's great. Oh, I've got a heap. I'm just like looking around my room now going, oh, I can probably even see something. Depends what the issue is, what people want to read about. Yeah, yeah. Well, I might get some of those resources off you and then I can include the initial notes. Yeah.

Brilliant. You mentioned the job searches. Are there any good places that you would recommend people go for jobs that are in this sort of area? Last year, I went to the International Conference for Health and Social Work in New York. Excellent conference. Great networking opportunities. You meet all kinds of social workers who are also interested in health and social work. And there's a brain injury stream there too.

So you can go and spend five days with people from all around the world who also are interested in a brain injury. Social workers who are interested in brain injury rather than a medical. Yeah. And so you get chatting to people and you're like, oh, hey, like the social worker that joined our team in December last year. Shout out to Amanda. Yeah, we met there. She's from Singapore. Like, she was working there.

She was like, I want to work with you. That'll be fun. And so she kind of followed our website until we had a job. And then she made contact. And she was like, hey, remember me? We met at that conference. And I've been working in brain injury in Singapore and I want to come work in Australia. And I think that's cool.

That's a fun way to network and make sure that these specialist skills were really. maximising them. She's a great asset, like at an international conference in York. So I think there's lots of ways that you can get into this area, whether it's networking, or I get a lot of students that come through. I support workers initially. I was a support worker first. It is a great grounding to really understand the personal care, how intimate that level of support is, but also being able to do it well and to have compassion and kindness and boundaries and be a good, support worker is a great setting for rehab work. There's many ways. I always joke all roads lead to raw rehab. Because you know, find people like, oh, I went and did child protection

for five years and then I worked in family therapy and now I'm at raw rehab. So anyway. I guess that points to being open and flexible like you've done in the past and a job might not be advertised as a social work job. And even though that's what you're heading towards eventually, you want to keep the options open and just get good experience doing something related. And be really clear about what are the transferable skills here that I'm developing. So if I am a support worker, I'm learning how to engage people. I'm learning how to have empathy. I'm learning how to have conversations.

I'm learning how to problem solve. I'm learning all about disability in terms of environmental challenges and problem solving and have a really good grounding in kind of the day-to-day experience. If I'm doing case management, I am learning, you know, I said my original job was in workers' comp, even just understanding some of that systemic staff that ultimately is relevant. It's just being clear about what is the transferable skill here,

whether hard or soft skills and just being able to say, yeah, I'm going to bring that into this next role and being really clear about why is that you want to come into health or why is it that you want to come into rehab specifically? Other things that might be useful or interesting is, I guess, think about social work and leadership, broadly and I guess some of the different overseas opportunities. And so the ASWs partnered with Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

This program has been around since the early 80s for social workers who want to expand their leadership skills. It's a six-week program at the Mount Sinai Hospital. There's an application process here. It's managed in Australia. And they take, you know, one or two social workers a year to meet with other social workers from Israel and Singapore or Taiwan or this year. be Ireland, but I think COVID put an end to that. And you spend this sort of like six

weeks intensive program in New York, in one of the biggest social work departments, 650 social workers. It's absolutely until you see it, you cannot believe it. And I think, let's like thinking about my own leadership social work journey, that was definitely like a huge moment in terms of confidence, building, knowledge, building, this combination of structured learning, leadership classes with amazing people and then research classes because it's a Mount Sinai School of Medicine is on site as well so you have like classes plus rotating through all these different social workers all these different parts so like at the moment if you were to think of any area of health I'm like oh yeah I've seen that from cradle to grave to transgender health to

liver transplant to I don't know you name it I've seen it so it's a wonderful opportunity if you're thinking about moving into social record leadership broadly in health settings and wanting to kind of have this huge expansive overview around big hospitals. It really can open up a lot of opportunities. Like, you know, once you see something, you're like, wow, that's really cool, and diabetes and that would absolutely work in rehab in Australia. Or that other program that they do with asthma programs in school is so interesting and we could have something very similar in Australia.

So I think if someone was thinking about, you know, leadership, social work, it would be something to look into. There are so many fantastic opportunities out there. If people are wanting to do research, there are the Churchill Fellowships. There's all sorts of stuff. Yeah. So.

Yeah. I had Churchill scholarships on my list for 2020. But I don't know if Kov was going to let that happen. So we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. And do you have any final thoughts, anything that you wanted to leave the listeners with? Any other information about what you do or how it all works?

If you're a student or a new grad thinking, oh, where's my career going? What am I going to do? I think you've just got to come back to what makes you happy and where do you feel authentically called that you can be very boundary, like you don't want to take people home with you. You can be passionately committed and enjoy the work, but not feel so emotionally intertwined with it that you are going to burn out. So, yeah, I think find your window of tolerance for your clinical work. So the work that you can love but doesn't push you into vicarious trauma or push you into, you know, thinking about them all night long. And different parts of social work suit different types of personalities. And it's absolutely okay to say child protection isn't for me or child protection is for me.

Like, you know, we need the child protection social workers. And I kind of heaps of people who are like, there's no way I could work in spine injury or brain injury. Like, that's just not for me. And I was like, good, because I'm here. So move over. Go find your own job. Not quite. But, you know, you just got to, like, we need all different people for all different jobs, and we're better off finding people that are passionately interested and committed to the area that they're in.

Yeah. It's just so amazing to see how you've made it a priority to address those barriers and the issues that you've come across. Think outside the box, not being afraid to bring up the taboo or the difficult topics. And I just think people listening to this will be able to feel your infectious energy. That'll come through really, really clearly. and I think everyone out there will be able to find some takeaways from your approaches and the initiatives that you've developed over your time at Royal Rehab and all your overseas experience. I just think it's so valuable for people to know that these sorts of things exist and we can talk about it. And I guess if anyone is interested in knowing more, perhaps they can reach out and have those conversations within their teams and say, well, Royal Rehab's doing it.

what can we do? That would be a very nice takeover if that's what people thought. Because I think, like, you're right, social work as a career offers so many opportunities. And the whole point of it is to work with people and pain points. If we ignore one part of a person's life, which might be a very big part, and what are we doing? So you've just lean into what's actually important for that person.

Yeah, thank you again so much. Candice, I really have enjoyed this conversation. I've loved touching base and going back to my rehab roots and impatient and all the wonderful work that you're doing interdisciplinary, but also with supporting social workers and helping them flourish and find their feet. So yeah, thank you again for the time. I really appreciate it. No, my worries. Thank you. Thanks for joining me this week. If you'd like to continue this discussion or ask anything of either myself or Candace, please visit my anchor page at anchor.fm slash social work spotlight.

You can find me on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, or you can email SW Spotlight Podcast at gmail.com. I'd love to hear from you. Please also let me know if there is a particular topic you'd like discussed, or if you or another person you know would like to be featured on the show. Next episode's guest is Alexis Stonebridge, New South Wales and ACT manager of social work services at Slater and Gordon Lawyers, the first private law firm in Australia to employ social workers to provide free clinical support to its legal clients.

In this role for the past nine years, Alexis provides telephone counselling, casework and referral to significantly injured and ill clients, as well as coordinating Slater and Gordon's AASW endorsed legal education program for social workers in New South Wales and the ACT and is co-editor of Social Work and the Law e-newsletter.

I release a new episode every two weeks. Please subscribe to my podcast so you are notified when this next episode. is available. See you next time.