I Hate Progress Reports

I hate progress reports. If you’re a rehabilitation support worker, these are the notes you write about your sessions with your rehab client, detailing goals you pursue and his performance on them. For a developmental support worker working in a group home, these notes are your observations and assessments of how the client you are assigned to behaves during a particular shift. Similarly, PSWs might also be required to complete these reports if their agencies require them.

I hate writing them. I find them fake and tedious. Even thinking of writing them, it's like some invisible entity is grinning at me. As I write them, the entity is now over my shoulders, reading what I am writing and absolutely howling.

Don’t get me wrong, I understand that accounting and documentation are essential in the healthcare field, but what else are progress reports good for? Why are they even called progress reports? As politically incorrect as this may sound, with clients in healthcare, there is often very little progress. They stay the same or get worse. These reports would be more accurately termed stagnation reports.

Oh, Elvis, how can you say such a thing?! Where is your drive to help your clients live a better life?

Where is my drive? It’s in the queue for still having their backs after green, gung-ho support workers bolt after experiencing a good dose of real life on the front lines.

The real problem with progress reports is that support workers are forced to report objectively, and they are not permitted to share their true feelings in them. You take Johnny to his drop-in brain-injury program at the outpatient clinic, and you can't write....

"At the round-table group discussion, Johnny kept pissing me off by speaking out of turn. I then took him aside and reminded him to be fair and give his peers a chance to speak. Johnny agreed, but when we returned to the discussion, he made it a point of being even more disruptive simply to spite me. I then gathered him, and we returned to the home. On my way home from the shift, I was still so irked that I considered stopping in at the first McDonald's that I passed to see if they were hiring."

Of course, you cannot write that; instead, you're straightjacketed into writing an emotionally vacant, marinated in stiff industry jargon, drab report. It goes...

"At the round-table discussion, Johnny kept speaking out of turn. This writer provided numerous redirections to try to settle him, but Johnny's interruptions continued. Next, this writer took Johnny aside, and we reviewed strategies from his behavior plan to address the triggers that prompt him to speak out of turn during discussions. Returning to the round table, Johnny's was unsuccessful with utilizing such strategies, and his interruptions escalated into outbursts. This writer then opted to take Johnny, and we left the program. Upon returning home, this writer briefed his supervisor on the session, and we reviewed tips to help Johnny manage his program more effectively."

Can you hear the howling?

Perhaps everyone hates progress reports. I suspect even supervisors hate them and especially reading them, but they insist on them because of the aforementioned need to have documentation in the workplace.

Actually, thinking about it, maybe I knew one supervisor who insisted on them strictly out of sadistic pleasure. I could sense that she, more than anyone, knew how much they irked me, but she kept asking me for them simply because it was an evil she had to exorcise. I could see the twistedness in her eyes when she asked.

Seriously, I am not making this stuff up. Ok, maybe I am starting to. Maybe just thinking and writing about progress reports gets me so spooked.

Anyway, progress reports are especially grievous for support workers. We are simply people who embrace our modest jobs of looking after disadvantaged people, which the world would sooner ignore. We go about our jobs unassumingly, which means we don't want to be bothered with writing contrived reports that keep us from being real and telling it like it is.

Yet, is this entirely true? Are we not also asking to be respected and treated like any other healthcare professionals?

Well, being seen as professionals requires us to step out of our comfortable, unassuming roles and embrace all aspects of our provider roles. In another blog, for example, I mentioned how support workers should stop seeing themselves as just hands-on caregivers and should be prepared to assist their clients with all aspects of their needs, such as directing them to resource options. Likewise, writing tedious, pretentious reports is what's required of us as professionals. We have no choice but to go all the way if we want to earn such respect.