miscarried

My friend so nicely put it: it's almost like I suffered a miscarriage.

To put things in perspective on how stuck SGH's HR policy is: it's like I joined Al Quaeda and Osama doesn't think I'm a very good terrorist, and therefore I'm not suitable. Not that Moral = Al Quaeda; my main point is management people aren't necessary there because they deserve it. My take is, from one management to another, you can't start questioning another organization's capability to manage because... Let's just say Moral's management most probably isn't the only unfit one around.

So it's said that I don't 'take my work seriously' so I guess we have to start from the start on what is it exactly I didn't take seriously.

Home Help Service West is a service providing services to elderly who are home-bound, so we send people down to the elderly's house to do stuff for them, which primarily consists five components: daily meal delivery, personal hygiene [2x a week], housekeeping [4x a month], laundry [ad hoc basis; clothes usually collected during meal delivery rounds] and to and fro escort for medical appointments. Of course, Moral doesn't provide such services for free; Moral is able to claim for each service rendered to each client from NCSS, i.e. NCSS subsidizes each client to an amount based on the subsidy they are entitled to, either 75% or 50% of the charge. So Moral graciously absorbs the remaining 25% or 50%, or so my manager led me to believe for the greater part I was there with her incessant whining that the clients need to be grateful because we're making a loss for them blah blah blah; turns out that MCYS foots the portion that NCSS doesn't, this little tidbit coming from my manager's mouth [hope people seeing are seeing a trend now?].

So my job essentially is to decide that someone is crippled enough to be placed on the service, and to assess their financial situation, in what we call 'means-testing', through collecting relevant financial documents like payslips and CPF thingies and then getting the Client's signature [thumbprint more often than not] on both a contract and the means-testing application form. NCSS requires both forms duly signed and filled up, approved by the social worker and the manager, with relevant supporting documents, before it can honour the payment for each client. For some reason, NCSS thinks that only a social worker is qualified enough to do the assessment and means-test.

How do I decide that someone is eligible for the service? Till today, I have no idea. There is simply no clear set of criteria I can work from. NCSS hasn't been that helpful either. My manager? Not social work trained, only notion of assessment is to sound sympathetic when talking about the clients, but dropping them at the slightest excuse. I did do my own research, consulted some journals and textbooks and came up with some forms and criteria, but it's a mixed bag; homebound-ness has a psychological component; the slightest wound can fell some people, while there are those determined few that refuse to let death or disability get in their way of living their lives, which gets tricky because people do make noise when clients are not at home and all.

'People' make noise when some clients are not deservedly 'homebound' by their books. They make noise when clients are feeding our food to the birds and demand I go check it out [like what am I supposed to do? ask the client? stake out?]. They make noise when I reject clients they referred on very valid grounds. Cutting a long story short, no fixed set of criteria, people thinking they know best, manager who doesn't know best.

Essentially, I'm just a glorified signature collector, so that Moral can claim the subsidies from NCSS. It doesn't really make a difference if I'm at the job or not; there can always be someone else more willing to get the signatures everyone seems to want to orgase over.

Intermittently, NCSS asks for statistics, beyond the ones they require every 6 monthly. So the stats are to prove whether the service is working or not. For Home Help, 4 sets of figures are required for every service, and a fifth set where all the services are combined. An example:

For the Meal Delivery Service
1. N [number of people] were referred for the quarter.
2. Of N, N1 were deemed eligible.
3, Of N1, N2 received the service.
4. Of N2, N3 stayed in the community at the end of the quarter.
Therefore, the N3 people are still in the community thanks to Home Help Service.

There was a meeting where NCSS got an expert to come along to discuss about service KPIs. At the table, I mentioned that between [3] and [4] required a considerable leap of faith, which everyone just laughed off. The expert came along, practically mentioned the same thing, albeit less dramatically, and everyone started groveling. So I hope this just goes to shows how meaningless the things NCSS ask for are.

They are even more meaningless considering you have a manager who doesn't know how to produce them, and the reluctant social worker who makes them up.

Towards the end, there was the issue with some old accounts: apparently our auditors [KS Chan] had to audit some collated figures for 2006 [when I wasn't there yet] and the only reference was like reams of reams of paper. Manager got into her usual high-panick-nothing-to-be-done-mode. KS Chan who probably thinks that accountants are god's gift to the world, and that he's god's gift to accountants, decided that the only way was to transfer everything to soft copy [that's like 400 clients x 30 days x 5-6 mths x 5 services] and 'can't we just get more social workers to do it' because god forbid, the accountant actually has to pore through paper work to verify stuff. I think the issue was resolved several temp staff later and some very, ahem, creative accounting.

So can I be forgiven for not taking a job that doesn't take me seriously seriously? A job where I have to learn whatever that needs learning on my own, and make up the rest?

But I do take the job seriously. I take my clients very seriously. And it's very disappointing when I don't seem to see the same seriousness around. I seriously think the service is severely understaffed; we service an area from Redhill/Commonwealth all the way through Chinatown to the Beach Road area. Lunch delivery starts at about 1030 and ends at 1, which is an awfully long time to wait for your food. There was, and still is, abit of an issue with clients living in some areas having to receive both lunch and dinner in one delivery. There's no fruits, or when there is, usually rarely, or when NCSS or some VIP is making a tour, it's usually only bananas. I personally find the food edible, so do most of the clients because they don't have a choice, but it's definitely not worth the $3.50/meal that NCSS subsidizes for each client, and that's the whole shady deal of outsourcing the food to this department called Moral Enterprise, which is very enterprising to say the least. The staff were not trained to escort clients, and quite frequently late for appointments; resulting in some clients actually missing their appointments. There was even the issue of getting clients to fix appointments at nearer hospitals so we didn't have to travel so far. Internal communications was archaic and involved many layers. Housekeeping sessions were random, and the default offered to the clients was 2x/mth [because if you offer 4x a mth and fail to meet that quota, you don't claim a cent at all, unless the client stipulated he/she wanted a lesser frequency].

It's almost like doing Home Help and biting off such a big pie so that you can tell people because we are doing it, like the same way my forms are properly needed so that my manager can sign them because there's really the only bit of managing she manages to do.