Safe Management in Burlington

Yesterday I was in Burlington recertifying as a Safe Management Trainer. If you don't know, I have a side gig where I teach a crisis prevention and intervention course for frontline workers at my agency. The pandemic shut down most of the demand for it, although I did teach a few awkward remote sessions. Because a significant portion of it is physical, it's very difficult to adequately teach that remotely.

In fact I as a trainer am supposed to recertify annually, but because of lockdowns the main office had to develop an online option, which is what I used last year. With only online training and a few awkward remote sessions since the onset of the pandemic, I felt like I was two years out of practice for this recertification.

There were no real public transit options to get from Kitchener to Burlington by 9:00 AM. Normally I would carpool in with one of my coworkers, but it turns out that both of the other instructors from my agency moved away from the position over the pandemic.

I wound up traveling after work on Monday and staying over in a hotel. Most of my reasons for staying in hotels over the years have been for trainings. Usually it's for longer though, so I didn't really have an opportunity to explore the area. Felt like there wasn't much in the around, though. At the training somebody asked our instructor if there was anywhere in walking distance to get food, and she said no, so I'm glad I packed dinner and lunch.

We were all required to wear masks, but it was still interesting to practice the escorts and restraints. Spent a lot of time in each others' breathing space. Even if it felt irresponsible in some ways, it was still good to do things the way that we used to. There were a few edits to the material and three new techniques. I learned about them last year from the online training but I only feel like I know them after practicing yesterday.

We have an online portal now, which gives us up-to-date information on new material. This is really nice since we've been keeping up through paper workbooks and a slideshow on a USB, both of which can get outdated between trainer recert sessions. I can also print out certificates for people now.

Because restrictions have been lifted, I'll be returning to traditional teaching sessions. Pretty well all Direct Support Workers are going to need to be certified again, so it's going to be busy. We'll require people to wear masks and we'll try to keep course sizes under ten, but otherwise things are back to normal.