Hi. My name’s Laura, and I work as a Social Worker at Royal Far West.
What’s your career background?
I was a Registered Nurse and Counsellor, and then I was lucky enough to do my Social Work student placement at RFW three years ago, and then I was able to stay here when I graduated.
Describe your typical day
A typical day for me is spent having appointments with families, making phone calls to other support services, emailing parenting resources to my clients, discussing ideas to incorporate more art works in our Centre for Country Kids interview rooms, or perhaps teaching other RFW clinicians about ways to identify and promote Child Safety.
In my meetings with families I often spend time encouraging parents to practice better Self Care because of the positive impact this has on everyone. Self Care may be individual therapy sessions, or perhaps a favourite outdoor activity, like horse riding. Whatever activity we can engage in regularly that allows us to feel relaxed, nourished and calm is Self Care.
What’s great about working at RFW?
I love working at RFW because I think parenting is hard and I enjoy helping parents learn better ways of looking after themselves and different ways to understand their children. My favourite work is teaching our parent group Tuning into Kids and Tuning Into Teens sessions, because I see positive and empowered changes in parents through the week; I see people who are struggling at the beginning of the group sessions change over the week into people who are excited to try new techniques.
I feel really lucky to work with families from rural and remote NSW because I learn something new about our countryside every time I meet a new family, and I enjoy the can-do attitude of our families as well!
I love to hear stories of how some of our child clients spend their free time at home, including riding motor bikes or helping on the farm, or even needing to be driven three hours to a ‘local’ football game!
The best bit of my job is reconnecting with parents when they return and update me on how their home life has improved because of what they have learnt from us. I wish we could replicate RFW around the countryside so more families could benefit from our integrated approach.
During this COVID-19 work from home time I am missing having my team around me, although there can be funny times too; today I did a zoom interview with a mother on the South Coast and she had her pet bird on her shoulder and I had my cat on my lap while we talked!
Take a look our Child Safe Principles.
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