This is a personal report based on my experience. Below is a screenshot of the assignment instructions. It is a social care based report on two critical incidents that took place on my 13 week placement. I was on placement at a day centre for adults with mild to moderate intellectual disabilities. The first critical incident you will discuss is as follows. I had planned to go on a day trip to the local college with one of the service users who will remain nameless. He asked me the day before the trip, if when we were at the college I could pay for his lunch in the canteen, and to not tell my practice educator, who oversees the day to day running of the service. This was critical because I would be breaking professional boundaries if i said yes, and did not tell my practice educator about it. Discuss the fact that i had to say no, but that i suggested he could bring a packed lunch with him instead if he didn’t want to spend money. With regards to social care practice literature, maybe discuss the importance of professional boundaries.
The second critical incident occurred on week 3 when my practice educator challenged me to facilitate a meeting with the service users about the upcmoning referendum and using their voices to vote. The meetings are always optional for the service users and since i had only been there a short time, I still felt like a bit of an outsider and hadn’t built any professional relationships yet really. With this, i struggled to grasp their attention and a few service users left, and noone had any questions at the end. I felt as though this was critical because it humbled me and made me realise that people with intellectual disabilities alot of the time will not try to protect your feelings by pretending to be interested and this hit hard for me. It also caused me to try harder to build professional relationships within the service in order to avoid this in future facilitations.
