Being An Internship Supervisor: Taking a Day Away from the Program
Yep, I'm an internship director who is taking a sick day.
There is a bit of guilt associated with this since I am the only music therapy supervisor at my facility. So, if I'm gone, then my intern does not have a music therapy supervisor present. That means that groups with a paid staff member present can happen, but individual sessions cannot.
I tend to be someone who believes that sick days are important to take during the course of work. Of course, I am also someone who gets sick quite often, so it has become easier and easier to use these days over the years. I also have a compromised immune system, so when someone comes to my room who is sick, I get it all. This, however, is my usual way of doing things in early February. I call it my "OCMT sickness" because it happens every year around OCMT time. I think it is the stress associated with my roles, and I tend to plan for it. Today's version is different from some of the other years' versions though. This seems to be mostly asthma - other years have included bronchitis, pneumonia, gut infections, and all sorts of things. I am thankful that this year is just a difficult asthma incident...at least, I think so. I will do a COVID test later today to make sure. So, what is an internship supervisor to do when the need for maintaining personal health overcomes the need to supervise your intern?
What helps me is a sick day policy. It is part of the internship handbook that each of my interns has from the beginning of the internship. I will be strengthening that part of the handbook for the next intern so it is very clear about what interns will do when I am gone from the facility.
With each incident and with each intern, I change bits and pieces of my internship handbook to reflect what has happened during that intern's time with me. I added more information to the paragraphs about what will happen in case of emergency surgery (November 2019) or global pandemic (March 2020 until now) after each incident because no document can cover every single eventuality. I tend to be more reactive than proactive with my documents because who can guess that your internship director's gallbladder will try to kill her one November night?? Not me - and I lived through it!
I would imagine that it would be a bit easier if you had other music therapists around to take over the supervision duties, but I'm alone. My student can find indirect supervision from the art therapist, but that person is not available during our sessions. She is busy doing her own sessions. So, when I have to be gone, we do things differently. Sometimes it means that my interns have to extend their time with us. Sometimes it doesn't. It depends on where the intern is in their internship as well as what I can be. Most of my surgeries were scheduled at times when I did not have interns, so my emergency surgery made me think about things a bit differently.
I, now, have a list of projects, articles, and assignments for interns to work on if we cannot be present. This list got much longer during the first few months of COVID when my interns were not allowed on campus. We scrambled quite a bit to find competency-based assignments at that time, but now I have a long list of options that I find meet the competency-based requirements of my program. Interns can get hours for these assignments. My poor intern during March 2020 was the one who helped me develop that list since she had nothing to do with our clients. We were still able to find some hours for her time and only extended her internship for a month so she could get some clinical hours and practice in. My next two interns went through the quarantine time that we had at my facility, so I was able to use the list we developed in March to increase their opportunities. We also added more and more to the list.
I have been a bit remiss in adding to the list lately. That is also something to review after intern #35 leaves and before intern #36 arrives. Add that to the list of things to review.
I am confident that my intern is able to complete her assigned caseload without me. When I am not all that confident, I instruct the intern to stay home and do tasks on the aforementioned list. This one, though, is almost finished so some time away from me is not a bad thing.
I am going to finish this up and then head upstairs to sleep. It has already been a long day, and it is just 7am now. I am hoping to be able to breathe a bit better after a day of rest and medication. I will be back to work tomorrow, breathing better and more rested.
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