End of my first placement - looking back

I am now at the end of my placement, just two weeks to go. Looking back, I think I have learnt huge amounts and been very luck to be placed in a setting where I have been so immersed in my clients' worlds, where I get to see them all during their good and bad days or hours, not just for the one hour social work appointment that I might be limited to in a different setting. I think that has been invaluable as a first year placement, helping me build my confidence in communicating with a range of clients, learning to put boundaries in place, to work with aggressive behaviour and to try to achieve some positive outcomes. I spoke in my group supervision on Friday about my lesson in celebrating the small differences. You can't come into this career without hoping to make a difference but none of us can 'fix' things. Of my 3 clients here, one is currently in prison and one has had to leave the placement temporarily after an aggressive incident. However within the last 6 months I can celebrate the little things I have achieved; the conversations where hopefully I broke through and helped give hope, the services I found and helped my clients engage with or the sense that someone cared which felt new and unusual to them. So many people struggle to define social work and admittedly my job on this placement has not been that of a traditional social worker - more a keyworker, working alongside therapists. But what has struck me, perhaps one of the many difficulties of the job, is that every time you open your mouth to a client/service user, you are doing your job and those words, that you often come up with in the moment are so important. When a client is telling me they feel suicidal, or unloved, or they are being threatening or just despondent or apathetic, we think in the moment of the best thing to say. And often I feel at that time quite a lot of pressure to consider my words carefully abd put the emphasis on listening. This is why I am glad next year we will be learning counselling skills. So I look towards my summer now, with a mixture of chill time, volunteering and dissertation work and am slightly disbelieving that I am now halfway through and will qualify next year. I am excited to start working with social workers in September and to get closer to the client group I believe I want to work with but I'll miss both clients and staff a huge amount. I feel lucky to have had this setting and I believe that the group supervision and fri afternoon business meetings together with regular 'pre' and 'post' groups are an invaluable foundation for reflective thinking, both on a personal and collaborative level. Bring on the final 2 weeks!