Transitioning from employment with a "not for profit" organisation to "Public Health"

...after a long break from blogging I thought it was time for an update on my journey.

After our holiday on Lady Elliot island I woke up one morning realising that I really did not want to return to my job. This had been coming on for quite some time and each week I would look in the jobs section for new positions that I might find stimulating. The problem with specialising in a particular area is that if you start to get bored (as I was), it is actually quite hard to find a new job you are qualified to do. The more I stayed in the job, the more I was drifting into a comfort zone and rut that was getting harder and harder to get out of. I also felt I was getting slacker and slacker in terms of my assessment and intervention skills. On top of that the organisation I worked for which is "not for profit", had begun to be run by people with corporate backgrounds and we suddenly found ourselves being managed by people who wanted to build empires and compete for the donor dollar with other not for profit agencies by duplicating services. We had a situation where one not for profit organisation began to compete for the same clients as another not for profit agency....a ludicrous situation not to mention unprofessional and a waste of the money donors had in good faith given to the organisation.

In late July therefore , I applied to do a locum with our local Children's Hospital, my application was accepted and I started 4 weeks later. While this sounds easy, I have actually found the transition from specialty to more generalist paediatric physiotherapy really quite challenging and hard. Not only am I working for public health, I have dramatically increased the number of patients I see in a day and ALL of them have different diagnoses. From doing the same assessments over and over and repeating exercise programs that were becoming all too familiar, I have thrown myself into re-exploring treatments and interventions for babies and children with plagiocephaly, torticollis, talipes, muscular dystrophies, CMT, chests, mild cerebral palsy, developmental delay.... From a community based setting back into Public Health and the medical model - I thought I could never go back down the Public Health road; thought that working for a "not for profit" organisation would suit my philanthropic conscience but I can tell you now that Public Health is a far more altruistic organisation than the last "not for profit" agency I worked for. The arrogance, the competitiveness of some of the not for profit organisations in our state is quite shocking and now that I am an outside observer, I can only describe the "antics" of my old workplace in terms of them wanting to be the "biggest and the best" as quite shocking. So those of you who work for Public Health in this State, take heart! Your standards of practise may be criticized by those on the outside but I can tell you now that things are not as bad as community agencies will have you believe and the "not for profits" need to take a good long hard look at their own practises to re-evaluate whether they are achieving the goals they originally set out to do.