Katrina has worked at OHU since September 2024, coming aboard as a Foster Parent Support Specialist for the Intensive Placement Stabilization (IPS) program. Before starting at OHU, Katrina was an entrepreneur, dabbling in many different fields. She was also a foster parent with OHU, where she had a foster placement for 5 years. With this experience and her degree in social work, she later found a job opening with OHU, leading her to where she is today.
What does a typical day look like for you?
A typical day at OHU can look like me arriving in the morning, doing paperwork, looking for resources for my clients, printing things out that would help like case notes, and going through my lovely binders. I make sure that everything I need is in the binder for a binder review because that’s very important here.
Everything else depends on the client. There are many different things that happen at each visit. I typically work with the caregiver, but sometimes the children are there. Depending on the behaviors it can be a smooth session or it can be a difficult situation. I had a situation where I got to the home and the youth was having an episode and the entire time I was there consisted of me bringing the youth down.
Typically what happens is I engage with the caregiver and see what the needs are. Is there anything that I can do? Can we go through any resources that I have found? Or, if I have given resources already, is the caregiver applying those?
What is IPS services?
IPS is a program where we go into the home to stabilize the home. We have mentors, clinicians, and foster parent support specialists (FPSS). We all go in, if needed, to tend to the caregiver and the child. We provide resources and anything we can do to stabilize the home. We are a six month program, but it could be extended based on need. We get called into homes based on placement and need. If the child is having behavior issues and the caregiver needs support, then IPS comes in and tries to stabilize the home so that the child does not need to be removed.
How it works is that we would get a referral from a case worker for IPS services for a home. Then, once we assess that we will be able to help, they are assigned a mentor, clinician, and FPSS worker. We provide our own mentor for the child, our own FPSS worker, which is what I do, to tend to the caregiver, and we also have our clinician that works with both. And we are weekly. We all come together and have a staffing to talk about the progress of the case. Is the caregiver making progress? Do we need to go in together? Can we get this home stabilized? We are always talking and communicating together.
Do you have a favorite “success story”?
I feel like they are all success stories. For me I like to go over and beyond, because I love caring for people. I feel like our presence makes some kind of impact on the child and the caregiver. I still have caregivers that call me even after we have closed. So I can’t narrow it down because they are all successes in their own ways. My favorite part about working here is that I love working with the clients. I love helping my caregivers and the children. And to see the progress from the time we get there to the time we leave, it’s just an awesome experience and I couldn’t ask for more.
Do you have any advice for people looking to apply to work at OHU?
My advice would be to be open and empathetic. Because the key is that the youth in care have trauma and we have to understand that. But it’s also important to have boundaries, I have to remember that because sometimes my heart doesn’t let me stop! I think that OHU is an awesome company. I had a foster child and now I’m working with the agency that helped me. I think that this was a great move for myself, and so I’d say if interested, “apply, apply, apply’!
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