Managing maintenance for low-volume unpaved roads is unique. This course presents basic background details, typical maintenance problems, and typical maintenance activities associated with low-volume unpaved roads. It also covers recommended procedures for developing and implementing simplified procedures for managing maintenance on low-volume unpaved roads. Unpaved roads can be constructed using a wide variety of materials, too many to describe in one course. As a result, in this course, we will concentrate on one of the most common types of low-volume roads. As an example, gravel roads, which are typically six meters or wider. Maintenance managers encounter a variety of maintenance problems on low-volume gravel roads. Dust formation is caused by traffic. Ravelling or disaggregation of the surface and loosening of the course aggregates also occurs. Rutting also occurs in all low-volume gravel road surfaces. Road surface erosion and potholes occur on gravel roads, especially when the longitudinal slope is over 4%. Gravel roads begin to deteriorate significantly when the longitudinal slope is over 7%. Corrigation is also typical in gravel roads. Roughness and upheaval distress occur in gravel roads because of subgrade movement or pavement instability. The typical engineering properties associated with the different types of low-volume gravel roads include different traveling speeds and vehicle weights associated with terrain, materials and environments. Traveling speeds typically range from 25 kilometers per hour on curvy roads to 40 kilometers per hour on hilly sections. Maintenance is typically divided into three categories. Routine, periodic and emergency work. Routine maintenance activities include such tasks as gravel pothole repair with production rates of 8 to 15 square meters per day, culvert cleaning at the rate of 6 to 8 per day, hand ditch cleaning at the rate of 1 to 3 kilometers of ditch per day and hand vegetation control with accomplishment of 0.5 to 0.6 hectares per day. Periodic maintenance activities include key activities such as regravelling. Crews typically can complete 250 to 300 cubic meters of regravelling each day. When doing surface grading, they can usually finish 3 to 4 kilometers per day. Using a grater for ditch cleaning, about 3 to 5 kilometers of ditching can be accomplished per day. About 1 to 2 culverts can be replaced per day and about 1 to 2 hectares of vegetation control by machine can be done each day. The final type of work is emergency work. It includes landslide removal by machine, snow removal and emergency pavement restoration. In order to accomplish these tasks in an organized and standard manner, it is suggested that basic work method statements are developed. A typical work statement for gravel pothole patching is shown here. In the example, to produce 8 cubic meters of gravel patching, it is necessary to use one hand compactor, one-third of an 8-ton dump truck and a complete set of hand tools. The required labor for this activity includes one foreman, 8 unskilled laborers and one-third of a driver. The maintenance work statement also gives a short description of the work method. You will also want to prepare a simple road and bridge inventory to provide updated information for maintenance planning in terms of volume of work and resource requirements. To prepare a proper inventory, you should include the following elements. Identification of each road link, location of roadway features, coding and determination of the level of accessibility of the local population and agricultural production. Engineering properties, length, width, type of road and terrain, number of culverts and bridges, type and length of ditches and number and type of traffic control devices, field evaluation, number and size of potholes, surface conditions, density and height of vegetation, slope failure hazards, performance of drainage facilities, types of soils and material haulage distance, other observations, special maintenance needs and suggestions for repair of pavement, drainage facilities, bridges and other elements included in the right-of-way. One engineering team can inventory and evaluate approximately 50 kilometers of rural roads a day. The annual needs for gravel pothole patching would be calculated as follows. GPP equals the total annual amount of gravel pothole patching. LNG equals the length of road segments. MSL equals the maintenance service level of gravel patching in cubic meters per kilometer. And AF equals the adjustment factor of the current road condition. For example, 3.3 kilometers of road was evaluated as being in very poor condition. This required that the volume of maintenance work should be increased by 20%. In other words, the adjustment factor AF equals 1.2. The annual maintenance service level MSL of patching is 6 cubic meters. Therefore, the annual gravel patching needs of this activity for this road are 3.3 kilometers times 6 cubic meters per kilometer times 1.2, the adjustment factor, equaling 23.8 cubic meters per year. In addition to the work needs that were determined by the overall maintenance plan just described, other maintenance needs result from the following conditions. Deficiencies that were encountered during regular field inspection. Deficiencies that were noticed by crew foremen while performing another work activity. And requests for maintenance services by users, usually in the form of complaints and emergencies. Once an inventory is taken and conditions noted, you should begin development of the annual program requirements for labor, equipment, and materials. The annual program is based on total annual work volume for each activity, the daily production of each activity, and the requirements for labor and equipment needed to meet the daily production. For example, the annual work volume of gravel pothole patching is 3,500 cubic meters. The daily production is 8 cubic meters. Therefore, the annual crew days are 3,500 divided by 8, or 437 crew days. Therefore, the annual number of work days for this activity is 437 times 1, which equals 437 work days for the foremen, 437 times 8, equaling 3,496 work days for unskilled laborers, and 437 times .33, equaling 144 work days for drivers. Programming of equipment days is similar. The number of equipment days needed to perform activity 111R is 3,500 divided by 8, equaling 437 equipment days. Each equipment day includes .33 dump trucks. Therefore, the annual number of equipment days needed to perform activity 111R is 437 times .33, which equals 145 equipment days for the dump truck. A detailed monthly schedule enables the field crew to clearly understand its short-term maintenance work objectives. Experience indicates that without a sound short-term schedule, crews frequently perform the easiest and most convenient tasks instead of those that are actually required. Experience indicates that work schedules for rural roads should be prepared for monthly periods. The actual preparation should be undertaken as a joint effort between the engineers and foremen who will be responsible for the work. Once the requirements and needs for labor, equipment, and materials have been determined and before the schedules are prepared, consideration must be given to the following timing, location, duration of work, and resource requirements. The preparation of the annual budget is the next task in the maintenance management procedure. This task is rather simple once the annual and monthly resource needs for equipment, labor, and materials are known. A detailed unit price analysis is performed to achieve an accurate cost estimate. A simple computerized cost analysis that includes the economic costs of equipment, labor, material, haul distance, and rate of production is completed to determine the direct cost for each maintenance activity. For each direct cost there are other indirect expenditures such as overhead, contingencies, supervision, and profit if the work is performed by a private contractor. Work monitoring and control is the last step in the process. The management of rural roads maintenance only requires the use of a simple field report that can easily be implemented on the site by the foreman or a senior crew member to report and control work. The purposes of the field reports are to identify and control the volume of work for each maintenance activity for each road. To update and adjust the rate of production for the different activities and road locations. And to update the maintenance needs and requirements for labor, equipment, and materials and schedules of future work. The field report includes accurate and reliable descriptions of work location, work accomplished, personnel, equipment, materials, and any special problem observed during the actual field operation. This information can be easily stored in a personal computer and has been found to be very useful in increasing production and improving the quality of maintenance work. In addition, the field information is valuable for any statistical analysis regarding the conditions and needs of maintenance equipment. In this course, we've covered the basics of managing maintenance for low volume roads. We covered typical maintenance problems associated with gravel roads. Maintenance activities, road and bridge inventory, work planning, labor or equipment programming, scheduling, budgeting, and work monitoring and control. For more information on this or other IRF videotapes, write to the International Road Federation or call the numbers on your screen.


This episode was prerecorded as part of a live continuing education webinar. On-demand CEUs are still available for this presentation through all CEUs. Register at allceus.com slash counselor toolbox. So I'd like to welcome everybody to today's presentation on common ethical violations. And I'm going to try to make it so it's a little bit more positive than talking about all the things to don't do. And we'll talk about some things we can do instead. But we do want to hit some of the highlights and look at some of the things that may have changed over the past two years since your last renewal. We will explore ethical guidelines with respect to multiculturalism, confidentiality, informed consent, documentation, and one of my favorites discharge versus abandonment. Ethical guidelines. We want to act in the best interest of clients at all times, which means acting in good faith in the absence of malice. We say that and of course we're thinking, yeah, of course, why would we do anything else? But a lot of times our ethical violations are inadvertent. We don't set out to try to hurt a client. We don't set out to try to do something that is harmful to a client, but somehow it happens. So we want to think before we act and as we're in a situation and developing policies and procedures for an organization, we want to think ahead and say to ourselves, what is the probability that something that we're doing could be in somehow in some way harmful to a client? And you know I'm a big proponent of trauma-informed care. So using that as an example, when you're creating policies and procedures for intake, I worked at a residential facility and when clients would come in, they would bring their bags in, they would go to the nurse's office, they would have to have all of their stuff searched, then they'd have this nurse who they'd never met before taking their blood pressure, doing all the basic, you know, stuff that we need to do for medical intake. But for people who had had a trauma history, that was not the most welcoming and that was kind of an intimidating sort of situation. So we looked at changing how that happened and the ways that we went about doing stuff. I mean even I as a clinician and then a director felt very invasive when I would have to go through their stuff and it had to be done because people did try to bring contraband into the facility. However, there was a difference between rifling through it indiscriminately and trying to be somewhat cognizant of how the person felt, you know, you don't want to go through their skivvies in front of five people that they've never met before. So maybe doing it in a situation where there's a little bit more privacy. So thinking about things when you're creating policies and procedures and how might this feel to a client? How might this impact a client? When we talk about the absence of malice and I talked about this a little bit last week, if you happen to be in a program that, and this is very, very true in substance abuse programs, but it's also true in mental health programs. If a clinician is not skilled or comfortable in handling certain diagnoses, sometimes the clients can feel like they are being judged or that the clinician is that they're not able to be helped because the clinician is like, well, I don't deal with that. And that's true when a mental health clinician says addiction. I don't know what to do with that. I'm going to have to refer you out instead of identifying that, you know, yes, that is a different diagnosis and there are different ways to handle it. And in order to best handle it, let's see what we need to do according to the Minkoff model. If someone is presenting with high symptomatology of mental health issues and low symptomatology of addiction issues, you don't necessarily have to refer out. You can consult and say, okay, this person is evidencing some behavior of, you know, binge drinking or something where it's not to the point they're substance abuse or their addiction is not to the point of requiring intensive care so it can probably be managed in a mental health primary setting. But we want the client to feel like they're not being judged. The same thing is true in addiction settings. If someone is not willing to embrace the 12 steps. A lot of addiction settings are 12 step based and they don't want to deal with anything else, which is from a, you can look at it from a multicultural perspective or a malicious perspective and that's kind of a weird word, malicious. But if we tell people that if you don't conform to our ways, then we're going to kick you out of the program, that seems pretty malicious to me. So we want to look at how can we be most inviting and accommodating to people's individualized needs. And if you're not familiar with addiction treatment, there are options to 12 step programs. There are cognitive behavioral approaches. There are spiritual approaches. There's a whole bunch of other stuff besides just 12 step. Anyhow, we want to inform clients of possible limitations on the counseling relationship prior to the beginning of the relationship. So what are the limitations? What can I and can I not do? But also what limits of confidentiality do I have? So before somebody comes in and starts spilling their guts and maybe says something that they don't want to say, they know that what our reporting requirements are. They know what we're going to have to report. And sometimes, you know, as a clinician, I'm like, well, I would rather know so I could intervene. But I've got to remember that the person in sitting in front of me is my client and the person sitting in front of me is the one for whom I'm serving at this point in time. So it's not trying to figure out any person that that person is harmed is trying to figure out what to do in the best interest of the person sitting in front of me. So in that vein, I'm going to let them know ahead of time that if you tell me about child abuse and you know, go through the whole list of things that I'm a mandatory reporter for and reasons that I may have to break confidentiality. We want to increase awareness of our own personal values, attitudes and beliefs and refer when personal characteristics hinder effectiveness. Now this is a huge hornet's nest. In Tennessee, there was a bill that went through the legislature that said that if a client of a different religious background comes to a clinician and they obviously have different religious backgrounds and the clinician is not comfortable treating that client because of the religious background then they can refer out and there was a lot of discussion about this, but ultimately it passed and so you know, it is what it is. But we want to look at the personal characteristics and if that person felt that strongly, would they have been able to be beneficent and non non non malfeasance and all those other things and faithful to their clients and loyal to their clients and all that kind of stuff. So we want to go through all those ethical guidelines and say, can you handle this? Can you put on your counselor hat and step out of your belief system as a Christian or a Muslim or whatever your belief system happens to be and you know, join with this other person with their belief system. There are also certain things that or certain issues if you will that you may not be willing to treat if you were a victim of sexual abuse as a child dealing with someone and helping them work through issues because they were an abuser may not be something that you're capable of fully doing in the best interest of that client at that point in time. So being aware of where you stand with your own issues and how comfortable you are looking at a client who may have who may resemble people that created issues in your past. Most of us have gotten over, you know, a lot of our stuff. We've been able to understand it, but there are still some enduring things that you may not be able to get past and the ethical guidelines say, you know, if it comes down to you cannot get past it, then it's ethical to most ethical to refer, but you want to do that early in the relationship. You don't want to wait until you're four months into it and go, you know what, I don't think I can really deal with this. And every once in a while something may come up that changes or the client drops a bomb on you and you're just like, okay, well wasn't expecting that. And then you've got to figure out if it's something you can deal with and with good supervision and consulting. Maybe your state ethics board, most ethics boards have a consultant who can say, you know, this is what you need to really think about. You can decide whether it's something, whether it would do more harm to refer the client at this point or try to treat the client with supervision. We want to actively attempt to understand the diverse cultural backgrounds of the clients with whom we work and our own cultural ethnic racial identity and its impact on our values and beliefs about the counseling process. So that's a lot of stuff. So basically we want to understand ourselves and what do we bring to the table and viewing everything as an interactive system. You know, when we walk in when I walk into a room as a middle-aged white female with a degree a higher education degree, how does that impact the situation with any particular client? How do I change the situation just by being me? And that doesn't mean I can't be me, but I do have to understand my impact on other people. Think about when a doctor walks into a room and a lot of people have some anxiety about white coats, white coat syndrome. Some a doctor walks into a room. They've got a lab coat on. All of a sudden people start to feel inferior because it's like, well, that person's a doctor and we can't, you know, the doctor knows best. Not, you know, I've lived in this body for 45 years. I think I know what's going on. So you want to look at what impact does your presence have? Maybe it's not you. Maybe it's what you're wearing. Maybe it's the decor in your office. Does that mean you have to change that? Not necessarily. You need to look at your clientele and consult your ethical personal ethics and figure out what it is that you can, you feel comfortable doing. And what, what, wow, can't speak today. What is it that you want your clients to feel comfortable saying, doing, being? So if you want your client to feel comfortable walking in your office and being of a different religion and your office happens to be just decorated in heavily Christian themed stuff. What does, what impact does that have? And how can you discuss it? I had one supervisor that I worked with who was a Christian counselor and he worked for a Christian counseling agency. So it was very obvious from the beginning that, you know, this was a Christian counseling situation. But he ended up working with a patient who was of the Muslim faith. And, you know, because it was a Christian counseling agency, she knew what she was walking into when she walked in there. And instead of butting heads, they talked about just what each faith thought about certain things. And he was interested and inquisitive about, okay, so what does your faith say about this? Because a lot of the issues they were talking about did revolve around her faith and what she believed in the decisions that she was making in her life. So we do want to understand our clients. If we don't understand, I came from a area that was very, very heavily Krishna and I had no idea about the Krishna religion. So when I would have a client come to me who happened to be Ari Krishna, we would talk about not only their thought path not only their thought patterns, but in what way their religion and their faith was impacting their decisions, their thoughts and because I'm not wanting to necessarily impose, well, not necessarily. I'm not wanting to impose my values and ways of thinking on them. So it's important you inquire. You don't have to know everything about your patient's ethnic background, their racial identity, where they came from. Heck, you won't. They walk into your office and you may not have any idea about where they came from, whether it was from, you know, somewhere in the middle of Tennessee or Detroit or Washington, D.C. Just by virtue of where they come from, geographically, they are going to have some values and some thoughts and some experiences that have shaped how they view the world that are probably going to be different than yours. You know, I've never lived in a big city. Big cities scare me because I get intimidated with all the traffic and everything. But when I work with someone from a big city who's having difficulty adjusting to, you know, rural America, you know, we talk about that and what's different here? What do you miss? We want to function within the boundaries of personal competence and be aware of our personal skill levels and limitations. If you are using a technique, make sure that you are competent in that technique. Don't just kind of go, well, I think I'm going to start doing whatever. Make sure that you're competent. Make sure that you know what you're doing. Get supervision. If you're starting a whole new technique, like if you're learning dialectical behavior therapy and you're using it as a protocol, make sure you get supervision. If you are trying to use experiential therapy, get supervision from someone who is skilled in experiential techniques, because I can tell you, sometimes you try an experiential activity and it doesn't go the way you expected. And having someone to process that with is very, very helpful and understanding what you're going to be able to start when you do it. Along with that, be aware of any activities that you do, going back kind of to the first slide, which may trigger trauma memories from your clients, turning down the lights, closing your eyes, saying prayers, meditation. Sometimes any ritualized opening or closing of a session can trigger traumatic memories for people. Be fully able to explain why you do what you do. And this isn't just during session.  If you're going to ask the client to do something or tell them to do something, you need to have a rationale, not just because I said so. If they need to do chores, why do we have them do chores? If they need to go to a meeting, why do we have them go to a meeting? And be able to explain the rationale behind it so they understand. They may not like it. Especially like the two examples I gave, chores and meetings. But we could also work with the client at that point and thereafter about incorporating, understanding why that's important to their treatment. And if that particular intervention was not appropriate for some reason, i.e. the meetings, what else could you do instead? And why may you need to go to the meetings for right now? Because like I didn't have the staffing to leave six people back at the facility and take the other 28. So we would want to explain why we were making clients do particular things. Encourage family involvement where possible when working with minors in sensitive areas that might be controversial. And I would also expand on this to say encourage family involvement where possible period. When you have someone coming to treatment, they're working hard and they are going to make progress exponentially. And the people that they live with, the people that they interact with, their family, their friends are not going to make the same sort of forward movement at the same time. So it's like the client starts a race and they start running and they get a hundred yards out and they're starting to change and they're starting to make progress and everybody else is still back here doing the same thing. And a lot of times they become very confused when your client starts acting differently which inadvertently tries to bring them back into the fray. They're like, you know, when we do this, you're supposed to do this. This is how the system works and your client is going, No, you know, actually, I'm different now. So we want to encourage family involvement when you have someone in residential treatment. It's extremely obvious when you have someone discharge and the family hasn't been to any treatment, any family education, any anything, their behaviors, their expectations, their understandings and their dysfunction has remained the same. And especially in addiction, addiction is a family situation, a family disorder because they have adapted their behaviors to accommodate the addict for so long. Now, when this person comes out and they're not behaving the same way, it upsets the apple cart. So we want to encourage family involvement in the treatment process. Now, family is loosely defined. That's whoever the person feels is their family. It doesn't have to be a blood relative. Who is it that you live with that you think may need to be involved? Who is it that you would call in two in the morning if you're having a problem? How do you define family? And those are the people that we want to encourage to be there so they can be as supportive as possible of the recovery process. Follow written job descriptions. Sounds like a no brainer there. Be sure what you are doing is defined as an appropriate function in your work setting. Not everything you do is an appropriate function at every work in every work setting. So make sure that you are keeping that in mind.  So be aware because there's a lot of liability that comes to your organization if you start acting outside of your job description. Read and adhere to ethical standards of your profession. I would assume. I would hope that we all did that. Consult with other professionals. Please know who some other professionals are in your area. If you aren't in a situation where you're in a in an agency where you have two or three people like right down the hall, you can go talk to know some professionals that you can call up and go, I've got an ethical dilemma or I'm stuck with this client and I wonder if you could consult with me. Obviously, you can maintain confidentiality of the client and all that happy stuff. But do have a network that also prevents you from getting burned out because other professionals can say, hey, you know, I noticed that you seem to be struggling with a lot of clients lately. Join appropriate professional associations. Read publications. Participate in professional development opportunities. Stay up to date on what's going on in your particular field. Not only with techniques to use with clients, but what are new developments that are happening? For example, when I got licensed way back when the NCMH CE didn't exist. So once you got licensed, you were able to diagnose and treat and write treatment plans and all that kind of stuff. And then what was it five, eight years ago? The NCMH CE came up and a lot of states started saying, well, even if you're licensed, unless you have this extra special designation, you can no longer write treatment plans or diagnose people. So that's a particularly important thing to be aware of. And ethically as well as legally, you need to be aware of it. Stay up to date with laws and current court rulings, particularly those pertaining to counseling with minors. What do they have to have parental approval for? What are the limits of confidentiality? Handling suicidal and homicidal clients. What are the current best practices in terms of identifying whether there's imminent danger to sell for others? And dealing with clients who have HIV, especially those that have HIV and are having unprotected relationships with other people. What is the ethical guideline for telling those people, for warning those people? What is the legal guideline? In some states, it is a felony to break confidentiality, to tell someone that your client who has HIV positive is tell one of their partners that the person is HIV positive and having unprotected sex with them. So make sure that you know the laws as well as the ethics and how to kind of balance the two for your state. Always consult with a knowledgeable attorney when necessary. I've had a lot of people go, well, attorneys are expensive and I don't work for an agency. How do I do that? Well, actually it's more affordable now. There are services out there where you can subscribe and you pay a monthly fee to basically have this legal service on retainer. And when you have a question, you call them and you're able to talk with an attorney who specializes in that particular area. I've used this for my business for many, many years and it's been invaluable because I know that I can call and get an attorney's opinion pretty much at a moment's notice and it doesn't cost me anything else besides my monthly dues to them. You also have the ability to consult with ethics boards and sometimes your insurance companies will also have a legal advisor that you can call and go, this feels a little hinky to me. I want to run it by the attorney. So check with your insurance provider and see if they also have somewhere you can consult with an attorney. Okay, let me see if I can get this to come up right here. And of course not. So we're just going to move on past that. This 10 legal identifies a lot of ethical violations and their statistics looking at how frequent frequently they actually happen. And guess what? Sexual relationships and dual relationships still rank way at the top of the ethical violations and reasons people are getting their licenses revoked. Also up there is unlicensed practice. Unlicensed practice falls.  You're working with a client in counseling.  So that's licensed practice. Yes, it is, but if you overstep your bounds and you start providing nutritional prescription or recommending supplements they take and anything that would be considered a prescription even if it's not written or oral. If you recommend, if you strongly suggest then you're crossing over into potential unlicensed territory and you've got to figure out for your own self ethically whether you know handing them a book about something steps outside of your bounds of practice. My personal opinion most of the time, I mean depends on the book of course is if I'm directing them to resources to educate themselves about something that's not prescriptive whereas if I say well it seems like you're suffering from X, Y, and Z so why don't you start taking these supplements and exercising four times a week. That's definitely outside of my scope of practice. Understand what constitutes a multiple relationship. Whose needs are being served and is the client being exploited? One area that I see this a lot is when agencies especially I really haven't seen it in private practice ask and I use that term kind of loosely pressure clients into giving testimonials or going and giving speeches somewhere. Most clients don't feel like they have the ability to say no so it's important because we have that authoritative we have that power over the client. It's important not to put them in a position where they feel like they might be exploited. If you want testimonials you might put a note out in the front lobby saying anyone who would like to give a testimonial contact you know whomever in the front office and we can definitely accommodate that but if you put a client on the spot and ask them would you please give a testimonial that could potentially be considered exploitive. Protect confidentiality discuss limits of confidentiality at the beginning ensure safe storage of records now I'm going to go off on a tangent here on digital records. It is very very important that you understand where all your stuff is stored. A lot of times people's laptops or or PCs. Don't have full hard drive encryption and you're like well the file that I store all this stuff in all my documents in is encrypted well that's great that is good that's awesome. However there are a lot of temp files that also contain that information because your computer backs up what you're working on every you know three five twenty minutes whatever it's set to so those temp files are not in that secured location and if you send anything into the printer anything that was sent to the printer is actually stored in yet another location that again is not encrypted unless your hard drive is full drive encrypted. So in to ensure state safe storage of records make sure any digital computers computers devices that you use have full encryption. Know your fate that federal and state laws about this is it well golly whether there's laws requiring disclosure about certain things what do you have to disclose if your records are breached when do you have to disclose. If your laptop gets lost do you have to disclose it you know most of the time it's yes but because of HIPAA laws you need to know when you need to disclose information obey mandatory reporting laws you know kind of self explanatory there. Obtain informed consent at the start of treatment a lot of you might be going well yeah unfortunately and I understand where it comes from you don't want to sit down with the client and go hey good to meet you let's do 30 minutes of paperwork and then we'll start talking about you but right now it's all about me because it feels very very impersonal and we want to be personal with our clients. So it's a little bit of an art to navigate but we want to make sure that we bring somebody in we get them so they're sitting down and feeling comfortable but before we start going into all their stuff we do want to have them sign their documents understand confidentiality and sign their informed consent. We want them to know what type of treatment is going to be provided and any alternatives a lot of times clinicians just say okay so we're going to sign you up for intensive outpatient treatment and this is what it's going to look like instead of saying my recommendation would be for intensive outpatient treatment this is what it would look like but you have other alternatives you have outpatient you have residential you have you know any other options that you might have making sure the client knows what their array is we want to let them know the cost and expected duration of treatment so it's not a shock for them and confidentiality identify your client and role so if an organization sends one of their employees to you for you to do an assessment or if probation and parole sends one of their probationers over to you to do an assessment who are you hired to help and what's expected of you who is the client and what are the limits of confidentiality document properly the guidelines at APA dot org are really helpful for identifying all the things that really should be in your records including your informed consent confidentiality demographic information what should be in your notes and your assessment so I'm not going to go over all that here because that's you know basic documentation 101 but it is good to review periodically to make sure that you're getting it all into your records because it's easy to become a little bit lax on some of the stuff that you know you don't use all the time practice where you have expertise some specifics to include in documenting therapeutic interactions according to the guidelines and ethics experts this is stuff that we often forget if you're in private practice especially it's easy to start getting lax and taking fewer and fewer notes I've worked with some clinicians who've been in private practice for a while whose notes are you know literally half a page for the entire assessment versus clinicians who just started out who end up writing something close to a dissertation so what things have to be in there identifying information and the date of first contact that way you can identify when this relationship began relevant history risk factors medical status and attempts to get prior treatment records attempts to get prior treatment records is often not in there but it's important to show that we attempted to do it in order to ensure continuity of care it's also important if you're working under insurance companies for level of care guidelines generally that's one of the things they require dates and service of fees dates of service and fees so when did you see this person what was the charge what was paid one of the things or risks for getting sued is when patients start running up a really big bill and we can talk about potential motivations for that but they found a direct correlation between the likelihood of getting sued and the outstanding balance of the patient who is suing you make sure you document what you're doing how often you're doing it how often you're getting bill sending out bills etc. You want to have diagnostic impressions assessments treatment plans consultation summary and supporting data and progress notes okay you know that seems self-explanatory one thing that you know I often don't include and I'm going to start including in my notes is not only the treatment chosen but the treatments that were considered and rejected that goes back to that informed consent and presenting all the options but identifying why the person declined the other avenues of treatment. This is especially true if the client declined the treatment that you recommended it's not uncommon in addictions for us to recommend something like intensive outpatient and the client to say no not ready to do that I'll do once a week outpatient and self-help groups. Okay if we don't believe that's going to do harm and obviously we can't force them to do any sort of treatment. We will document why they chose that why they declined our recommendations and you know so on and so forth that way if it ever comes back we can prove that we tried to get the person to enroll in this level of care but it was declined. Some specifics to include in dark documenting therapeutic interactions informed consent consent to audio tape or videotape so even if you're only audio taping or videotaping for your own personal edification and your own self supervision the client needs to sign an informed consent release of information and documentation of any releases this is something that is overlooked a lot releases of information not so much I mean we're good about doing those but a lot of times we overlook the fact that we are required every time we release information on a client to document to whom that information was released the date and exactly what was released so if the client ever wants an accounting of disclosures we have a sheet in their file that can say we provided this information to this person on the state. It's important in agencies to do that to relevant telephone calls and out of office contacts so if the client calls and says I'm not going to be able to make my appointment or they call and they're in crisis we need to document it doesn't need to be this huge thing but there does need to be a space in the chart to identify that you had contact with that client on that day. Follow-up efforts when clients drop out of site or drop out of treatment. If they just drop out you can't just discharge them and then never contact them again that's we're going to go into abandonment but that kind of falls it under abandonment if a client drops out of site we don't know whether they tried to commit suicide we don't know whether they weren't happy with our services we don't know if they're doing better we don't know and in order to be faithful to our clients and try to do what's in their best interest we at least need to follow up and provide them with referrals provide them some sort of closure let them know they're being discharged they may not answer your phone calls they may literally just kind of drop out and you can't find them you try calling and you don't get through so you need to send a letter that says something to the effect of I haven't seen you since so-and-so date on such-and-such date you will be discharged if you don't contact the office at blah blah blah here are some referrals you don't want to just kick them out you want to give them referrals to make sure they're safe and then send it to their last known address it's not ideal but you're doing the best you can we're not going to hire a private investigator every time someone drops out of treatment but we do need to follow up it also communicates to the client if they dropped out because they didn't feel like that like they were making progress or whatever the reason it communicates to them that you care and they're important which sometimes is enough to bring them back in you want to have enough details in your file so if another provider needs to take over in your absence they can when I was pregnant with my son I ended up having him at 29 weeks so obviously I wasn't planning to go on maternity leave for quite a while longer and all of a sudden somebody else had to walk in and pick up my caseload so it was important that my notes be sufficient that the next clinician could come in and at least have a general idea about what was going on with each client and what their treatment goals were etc know the difference between abandonment and termination treatment can be discontinued when clients are not benefiting from treatment anymore kind of should be discontinued if clients are not benefiting if they've reached maximal gains at this level of care then they need to be discharged whether that means referred up to a higher level of care referred down to a lower level or just plain discharged we don't want to keep them in if they're not benefiting from treatment if they're not benefiting but they're still symptomatic we also may consider a referral may not we want to discontinue treatment if the client may be harmed by treatment maybe they're recovering from addiction and all of a sudden you hit some trauma issues and you know the client is really struggling to stay clean and sober with dealing with this trauma stuff and you're their trauma counselor not their addictions counselor because they've got to so you may want to look at is it ethical and is it in the client's best interest to keep hammering away at this trauma stuff right now or do they need to get some more clean time before they can handle it discharge them if they don't need therapy anymore if they're doing well we wanted to we want to support the fact that they're doing well and go hey you know what you're doing awesome now I'm here if you need anything however I think we can start moving towards discharge and with most of my clients I don't go from once a week to nothing I'll go from once a week to twice a month and then maybe one or two once a month sessions and then they're discharged unless they start having more problems but 90% of the time they wean off and they don't need that second monthly appointment they're just they're good pre termination counseling involved the client in the process according to all level of care guidelines the insurance regulations for how to get paid they all say discharge planning begins added mission what does that mean that means if the client walks out of your office today and never comes back they need to have some resources they need to know what the next step might be so discharge planning starts as soon as they walk in we say you're probably going to be with us for two months we want to accomplish these goals and then here are some other resources that you may want to tap into during treatment abandonment is when the client drops out of treatment and the therapist doesn't follow up or the therapist discharges the client without appropriate referrals if you for whatever reason have a conflict with the client and you decide you need to discharge them and you don't give them referrals you're just like nope this isn't working bye bye you fire them if you have not give given them referrals and ensure to transition then it's abandonment if the client is in an emotionally distraught state if the client is struggling if the client needs therapy and you just kick them out then you are not doing what's in the client's best interest stick to evidence when giving an expert opinion conducting assessment or documenting or documenting when you're doing your documentation always assume that your client is going to read it now chances are they won't but if you assume that then if your clients read it then they won't be hurt by it you want to always stick to the facts you know client is depressed as evidenced by client is struggling with XYZ symptom as evidenced by try to keep it as objective as possible there is a section for interpretation you know your clinical impressions and all of that but try to stick to things that are supported by observable evidence also be aware of what you do and don't know you know if you don't know something maybe you don't know what's causing a particular symptom or you don't know all the details of your clients past don't assume you do and be very clear about what you do and don't know ethics involves constant awareness of the clinicians own motivations and attention to the client's best interest effective documentation can eliminate many sources of confusion at the beginning and can support us in legal situations good documentation means it happened if it's not documented it didn't happen but the better the documentation the more thorough the picture is for whoever else the outside parties that are looking at it to go yes you did everything that a reasonable clinician in your position would have done annually read any changes to your state's statutes to ensure you're not violating any legal and or ethical dictate you can usually go to your licensing board's website and you can find a list of anything that was changed in the prior 12 to 24 months any rules that were changed generally on the front page and highlighted from what I've seen on the different states when in doubt consult other professionals ethics committees or your attorney and or your attorney okay so a question came in do you have any thoughts on the concept of what is in writing is discoverable in a lawsuit versus keeping good notes yeah that always gets really tricky and the safe answer is to say always consult with your attorney when you're questioning whether something should be in a in a clinical record when I do my clinical records I put in as much as is necessary to support their diagnosis to support the treatment and that's factual but a lot of times when I'm working with clients if there's something that I'm questioning putting in the record because I think it might be too personal for them I ask them I'm like you know I want to document this in in your record but how do you feel about this being down there in in black and white now as far as if it's discoverable in a lawsuit if I'm concerned about something being in a lawsuit then I need to look at what why am I concerned that there might be a lawsuit if I'm working in a divorce or a custody case then I'm going to probably be more of more objective rigorously objective in my in my notes but you know I think it's also important to make sure that we paint a clear picture for ourselves and for the clients of what's going on one thing that I do with my clients partly because I find it's I find that they find it empowering is we write notes together I saved the last ten minutes of a session and we go over you know okay what did we talk about today and we'll review what we talked about will review their progress on their treatment plan goals and we'll review their goals for the next week we'll write all that down together so they know what's in the notes so there's nothing scary about this file that's sitting on my desk and if they have objections with something being put down they tend to say it there if there's something I feel needs to be put down that they are kind of not feeling it we talk about why they're apprehensive about having that down in writing and what they think might be the potential outcome the when we do the assessment I do the same thing after I complete my assessment I tell them anything I write down you have the right to read because they do whether I like it or not is irrelevant they have the right to read their their clinical chart so I make it make sure that they know from the very beginning you know I'm not writing down anything scary or or whatever because a lot of times people who either haven't been to counseling before or may have had a bad experience may feel like you're writing down something that is unflattering to them so making sure that they feel comfortable with what's going on they see what we're putting down they see how we come to our diagnosis you know I help explain the process of you know how how did we arrive at this diagnosis of depression well because we talked about these symptoms so I like I like my clients to be fully aware of what's in their chart and why I'm making the recommendations I'm making because then it doesn't come back as them feeling like I was doing something underhanded or behind their back that's a really long non-answer to what do you exactly put in the chart versus worrying about a lawsuit and aside from saying in particular cases where you think it could become very litigious contact an attorney stick to the facts be objective as possible and you know you're going to be in much less murky water than if you start putting all kinds of interpretations in your chart what are other people's feelings on on that I've also heard although you're not supposed to do it I've heard of clinicians keeping basically two sets of books one with their subjective interpretations and another with their objective the other thing to remember is in most states progress notes need to be requested separately they're not actually part of the clinical record so make sure that when you're releasing information you know whether or not you have to release the progress notes in addition to the assessment data and other things but anyway back to y'all what are your feelings on cautious noting and again I like having them involved even if I don't think whatever case it is is going to be litigious because I find that it's empowering to them they learn more effectively how to set and follow through with goals and things like that and they know what's going on so it doesn't seem like I'm you know magically doing something and they're feeling better they're realizing their part in it the other reason I do notes with my clients is it keeps me on task because I really hate doing notes I'll be honest you know they have to be done but it's definitely helpful in a lot of different ways again you want to look at your state statutes for how long you have to keep records most states it's somewhere between five and seven years from the time of their termination from from the program so but again each state actually regulates how long you have to maintain records and I agree getting the clients buy-in in the treatment really helps them follow through and the more involved they can feel in the process the more likely they are to keep the momentum going has been my experience if you enjoy this podcast please like and subscribe either in your podcast player or on YouTube if you want to attend and participate in our live webinars with Dr. Snipes you can subscribe at HGTBS colon slash slash all CE use dot com slash counselor toolbox this episode has been brought to you in part by all CE use dot com providing 24 seven multimedia continuing education and pre-certification training to counselors therapists and nurses since 2006 you can use coupon code counselor toolbox to get 20% off of your current order if you're a podcast listener especially on an Apple device it would be extremely helpful if you would review counselor toolbox to do this on your Apple device go to the podcast app search for counselor toolbox select the icon for the podcast tap the reviews tab in the middle you should then see an option to click write a review we love to seek five star reviews so if 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Hi, my name is Julia Kirby and I'm here on behalf of the Portland Public Art Committee, which is pleased to bring you another series of art in our front yard, talks about the public art throughout Portland. Today we are delighted to have famed author and playwright Monica Wood speak about the Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the square that bears his name. Hello everybody, my name is Monica Wood and as a writer I feel uniquely unqualified to be speaking about public art. However when the Portland Public Art Committee asked me to do one of their art talks, they assured me that I could choose any piece of public art, my thought instantly went to the Longfellow Monument, in part because my taste in public art tends toward the traditional. I love this one, I love Lady Victory down on Monument Square, I love the Lobsterman on Temple Street, I like the John Ford statue on Danford Street, so I thought this one would be a good choice for me, but mostly I chose it because I'm quite fond of the guy sitting up there in that chair. I feel a kinship with him as a fellow writer. So here we are at Longfellow Square, a busy Longfellow Square in Portland, Maine, in the grand shadow of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose life spanned most of the 19th century. He died in 1882 at the age of 75, which was a pretty good old age at that time. He was a true son of Portland, in fact he grew up right down the street on Congress Street in what is now known as the Longfellow House, next door to the Maine Historical Society. And if you have not yet taken a tour of the Longfellow House, I would highly recommend it. You learn a lot about Portland and there's something about that house that is special and that is the Longfellows are the only family that ever lived in it, so there are no recreations. Everything in the house belonged to them, all the cups and saucers, all the doilies, all the furniture, so it's a wonderful tour and I highly recommend it. Now our friend Henry here was a scholar and a linguist who had a great facility with languages. He spoke three or four or five languages well and he taught modern languages at Bowdoin College and then later at Harvard. But Henry's gig was poetry and in his lifetime he was the most famous and most beloved poet in the entire English-speaking world and it's very hard for us to imagine now how that could possibly be true to have a lowly wretched writer be such a huge personage in the world, but Henry was. He was so famous and so beloved, in fact, that not long after his death a committee called the Longfellows Statue Association, which was composed of prominent men in Portland for whom streets are now named, they decided to begin plans for this monument in what was then called State Street Square. The chosen artist was a sculptor named Franklin Simmons who was a prominent sculptor of the day and he was another main boy. He was born in Webster, Maine, but he grew up in Bath and Lewiston so they chose a main boy to make a sculpture to honor a main boy. In fact, as you'll soon see, this whole shebang is a Portland, Maine outfit from top to bottom. It's pretty cool actually. I'm pretty sure that Franklin Simmons who did Lady Victory down on Monument Square and has a bust of Ulysses Grant on permanent collection at the Portland Museum of Art. I'm pretty sure whether or not he was born in Maine, he would have gotten the job anyway because he really was very well known. Now, at the time, Franklin Simmons was working out of a studio in Rome. So he created the statue out of cast bronze in his studio in Rome and then they shipped it over here, which must have been quite undertaking, I can imagine. You can see it's huge. The pedestal was designed by Portland architect Francis Fassett and was fabricated by the Hawks Brothers Stonecutting Company down on Myrtle Street near City Hall. So again, Maine, Maine, Maine. It's pretty cool.  Everyone loved Henry Longfellow, of course, and knew the family. And as I said, the statue was brought over here, but they had to hide it for a week because the unveiling was a big deal, there was a program and they had to set up all the chairs and everything. And so they covered it with an American flag and it sat there for a week covered. And I like to imagine the people coming by and trying to peek under the flag and see what it might look like. And on the day of the unveiling, it was a day in September, very close to today as a matter of fact, but it was not a day like this. It was cold and it was breezy, but people came in great numbers and were thrilled to be there. And according to the newspaper report of that day, when the flag was whipped away, there was invited a great applause. And it goes on, the modeling is admirable. Even the shoestrings have received great care. So you can look at the shoestrings up there. My personal favorite thing on that sculpture is the cat heads on the arms of the chair. And I think they're supposed to be lions, but I somehow see them as cats because I think of Henry as more of a cat man than a lion man. I just have that feeling about him. The entire cost of this monument was $17,000, which was a boatload of money back then as you can imagine. And the base of the pedestal was a gift of Payson Tucker, who was the GM of the main central railroad. This monument was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1990. Now our friend Henry here was known the world over in part for history poems that took from historic events. And though he did appeal to scholars and readers of all stripes from every walk of life, people loved his poetry, but he appealed in particular to children. Schoolchildren routinely memorized the poems of Longfellow that we still know today. And in fact, there may be people here today who can remember, memorizing part of or all of poems like Paul Revere's Ride, The Song of Hiawatha, Evangeline, The Village Blacksmith, Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree, A Village Smithy Stans. I remember reading The Wreck of the Hesperus when I was in probably fifth grade. And I can remember being utterly bowled over by the rolling, crashing description of this horrible shipwreck and this young girl who was in great peril. Henry really did have a way of writing that appealed to kids. And I find that very fitting because Henry himself came from a family that valued its children, even indulged its children. Henry in turn was a wonderful father and very indulgent of his own children. And he was really beloved by children all over the world. One of the most appealing aspects of this monument for me is something I found out when I was doing a little bit of research for this talk today. And that is, at the beginning, the Longfellow Statue Association decided that because Longfellow was known as a poet of the people and the children's poet, that it would be a great idea, very fitting, to have part of it financed by any person with a small sum so that everybody could have a chance to contribute. Children across New England were also encouraged to donate a nickel, a dime, or a penny of their own money that they earned, which they did by the hundreds. And these kids earned this money. And some of them were talking about the late 1800s, so some of them were probably actually working at jobs that we would never have a child do these days. So they sent in their tiny fortunes, and in return, they got an embossed card with an image of Longfellow on it. And what I did not know, it's the sweetest thing about this monument, is that the names of all of those children are on the premises here, they're in a copper box beneath the pedestal. It's a kind of time capsule, isn't that cool? Yeah. And also in that copper box, there is a copy of each of the 11 newspapers published in Portland at the time, 11 newspapers in a city with a fraction of this population. That blew my mind. And there's also a copy of the Portland City Directory of 1888. And there is a copy of Francis Fassett's original drawing of this pedestal. So even if we had a horrible disaster, and there was like the tornado of the millennium or earthquake, and our dear Henry toppled over a pedestal in awe, at least we would have the compensatory pleasure of getting our paws on that copper box. I would love to be able to open that right now. Now we tend to think of Longfellow as a poet of romantic stories and nature imagery, and he certainly was that. And he was thought of as a good-natured man with a gentle disposition. Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to him as a sweet, gentle man. Now when you look at this grand representation of him, sweet is not the word that comes to mind, but apparently he really was. He was a sweet guy. And you would think that somebody with a sweet disposition like this probably had a fairly easy passage through life, but that is not the case with Henry Longfellow. He suffered great personal tragedy in his life. His first wife, they were on a trip to Europe. He was doing one of his linguistic acquisition trips, and she had a miscarriage at the age of 22 and died of the complications. Henry mourned her death very deeply. In fact it was three years before he could even bring himself to write a poem in her memory. And then his second wife, her name was Fanny, he courted her for seven years before she agreed to marry him. I would love to know the details of that story. He was madly in love with her.  She succumbed to her grievous injuries and Henry probably never really got over that loss. He loved her so much and they had also lost a little girl in babyhood. She was named for her mother and she died at age one. So our Henry was no stranger to personal grief, but there was another great sorrow in his life that was shared by every other American and that is the tragedy of the American Civil War. One of Henry's dearest friends was a Republican abolitionist senator from Massachusetts named Charles Sumner who was nearly beaten to death on the Senate floor a few days after he gave a fire and brimstone speech filled with lots of colorful language and insult about the obscenity of slavery. This Southern congressman took great issue with this speech and a couple of days later came in, found him in the Senate chambers and he had a stick, a metal tipped stick of the sort used to keep dogs in line and he proceeded to beat Charles Sumner nearly to death. So there's a flood of blood, he's unconscious, you can imagine the horror of this story and Henry his dearest friend took this very, very hard and Henry is one of the people who helped Charles with both his physical and his spiritual recovery after that incident. Henry not only offered comfort, encouragement and sometimes money to fellow abolitionists, he used his greatest gift, poetry, to try to turn public opinion against slavery. One of his publications was entitled Poems on Slavery which included this verse that brings the reader into the terrified heart of a fleeing slave. In the dark fens of the dismal swamp, the hunted negro lay, he saw the fire of the midnight camp and heard at times a horse's tramp and a bloodhound's distant bay. His cadences are very beautiful. In that same vein, one of Longfellow's most well-known poems is something that we have now appropriated as a Christmas carol and we call it, I heard the bells on Christmas day, I heard the bells on Christmas day, their old familiar carols play, and wild and sweet the words repeat, peace on earth goodwill to men. Well in fact that poem, there's a dark thread that runs through it and that runs through a lot of the poems he wrote at that time. He called it Christmas bells and it is really about the heartache and horror of the civil war and here are two verses that we never hear when we're singing it as a Christmas carol and there is a line in there that refers to each black accursed mouth and what he's referring to there is the mouth of the black cannons and they go like this, then from each black accursed mouth the cannon thundered in the south and with the sound the carols drowned of peace on earth goodwill to men. It was as if an earthquake rent the hard stones of a continent and made forlorn the household's born of peace on earth goodwill to men. You know he was a complicated guy, our friend Henry here. He was famous, he was wealthy, he was greatly cherished. He suffered irreplaceable family losses and the loss of the unity of his country and through it all he wrote and he wrote and he wrote which is why I just love him. So the next time you're stuck in traffic here at Longfellow Square instead of cursing the driver ahead of you who didn't jump the light I would recommend that you just take a breath look up to Henry say hello and maybe try to recall a few lines of poetry that you might once have committed to heart when you were a child. It might be one of his poems, it might be somebody else's but I can't think of a more pleasant way to wait for the light to change and I can't think of a more appropriate way to honor the life of Portland's favorite son Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Thank you. Thank you very much everybody for being here.


from Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018.  Welcome back to AWS re-invent. Along with Justin Warren, I'm John Walls. We are live here in Las Vegas. Day two of our three days of coverage of this event, seventh time we've been here. And as we've been saying all along, this show is getting bigger and better than ever, about 40,000 attendees this year. Joined now by Abbas Haiderli, or Haiderali, excuse me, CTO of X-Matters and Chris Krakow, who is the lead solutions architect at Biasat. Gentlemen, thanks for being with us. Good to see you. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having us on. All right, tell us a little bit about your respective endeavors and then why the two of you are here together, and Abbas will let you lead off. Sure, so I'm CTO of X-Matters, as you described, and our company is basically a digital service availability platform, which, outside of the marketing speed, and from a technical perspective, means when bad things happen with technology, and all technology is great, but inevitably, things go wrong, things bad things happen, and we're in the business of helping companies get those things fixed as quickly as possible, ideally, before they become business impacting. And basically I asked Chris here to join me, because he is, you know, you can have technology, we need someone to put it into practice, and Chris has done a great job bringing it into real world at Biasat. Yeah, it's a good transition. Thanks Abbas. So my role at Biasat, Biasat's a satellite-based technology and communications company, and my role is to help administer and deploy some of our automations for orchestration, monitoring, performance, and incident management. A lot of that has to do, as it relates to X-Matters, with notifying people when they eventually have to go hands-on keyboard, and minimizing the amount of administrative burden that they have so that they can just focus on fixing a problem. You mentioned before that everyone who was traveling here on an airplane, if they were using the Wi-Fi, they were probably running over your service. Right, yeah, so one of our... I am astounded that that even works at all, speaking of technology breaking all the time. So maybe explain to us a little bit about how X-Matters helps you keep that thing actually functioning. Yeah, that's a great question. One of the things that we monitor very, very tightly is our customer experience, both on aircraft and residential broadband. And so when we're starting to see things where those planes are passing through beams and maybe not handing off the internet connectivity well, if we're seeing people trying to get on the internet and they're either having a slow time or just not getting on at all. One of the things that we want to do is get that to the right people quickly. So one of the things that we do is we have our customer care elements of commercial mobility in X-Matters so that they can report that to the engineering level for that same area of business. When they do that, it's opening up a Salesforce case, it's notifying a hip chat room, it's getting ahold of the on-call resource and it's also administrating all of that stuff back to the originator of the problem so that they can keep them informed of this is what the engineer found, this is how long it's going to take to get fixed, this is what you need to tell the customers. So it's enabling a lot of communication while reducing a lot of some of the traditional operational elements that go along with incident management. Yeah, and something that we've been hearing quite a bit this week here at AWS is the importance of that operation side of things. It feels like the whole industry has moved from this being a new technology that we should start doing brand new things with and it's matured a little bit where we're actually relying on this stuff to run real multi-billion dollar businesses and operation starts to become really, really important. So as you said, when things break, we want to fix them as fast as possible so that customers can keep using our services. Right, and kind of in the path when you look at all the companies that are here, they're building fantastic new products, builders are a big part of this event. It's all about building the services and you hear a lot about automation and tool chains and the CI CD pipeline. Well, the CI CD pipeline really ends at delivery and that's kind of where our product picks up. So it's in the operations and support realm of it is once it's out there, things inevitably will go wrong. And a lot of the companies you see here are all about detecting that very, very quickly. You'll hear conversations about one second resolution to detect issues and those things have to be handled. And really one of the things that we're seeing a big trend in is going through and saying, how do we remove the manual process and administrative overhead and the toil in actually operating these services when inevitably something goes wrong? And it starts off small and can grow very quickly. So a lot of people use our product to essentially tie those alerting systems directly into X-Matters. It goes out, gathers a lot of the information that people would typically do by hand, kind of the manual effort, delivers it to the right on-call person and arms them with the action that moved them through. And really that cycle of steps, when you think of it as every individual team in service has a series of flows that they go through when things go wrong. It's about taking those steps and putting them all together in the right order and swapping them out as you need to as your service matures and grows and as your innovation is successful and as you grow in scope. Those steps may change, but the flows across the teams remain remarkably the same. Yeah, is there a particular, you talk about flows and different avenues, different opportunities for problems. Is there one that tends to stand out amongst the crowd as, you know, that's our biggest headache and whether it's if we're a Christmas business or for just in general, for any of your clients. Is there one that just leaves your head scratching your head?  One of the biggest problems that we see is that a lot of these organizations have built kind of a distributed operation model. And one of the biggest problems we see is think of it as like you've got a whole series of things, it's kind of a bunch of a series of points on kind of a kind of spokes. And one thing goes wrong, other people are consumers of it and other people are impacted and all get engaged, say my thing is also sending me a signal saying my work has gone sideways, but it's very difficult to figure out where the actual responsibility lies and how do you engage just the people who can actually fix the issue and then let everyone else who is impacted by it be informed but told to stand down. So they don't waste their cycles on resolving that. And that's a very complicated problem that there is no magical solution for. So if anyone's listening and looking for, okay, that's what I got, give me an answer. I don't have a solution for you, but I can tell you that a lot of these sorts of operational tasks we're putting in place are designed to minimize the effort of kind of figuring out what that is and really speeding up that information cycle so you waste as little time as possible. That's South America, Chris. Very familiar, yeah. So Visats Company motto is always a better way. And so one of the things that we do with X-Matters and the other tools in our incident response chain is take what we learn when we do have an incident, when we do have a problem and find a better way of approaching that. So it allows us to refine our integrations into X-Matters. It allows us to communicate more effectively to the right people. And it allows us to really kind of harness our DevOps model and that company credo to our advantage and constantly perform better for our customers. Yeah, we were talking before we went live here. This is dealing with issues at the scale of space. So these sort of problems, and it's a theme that we've been hearing over the last couple of days that the amount of complexity on these kinds of systems and something at the scale of a space-based platform, this is something which isn't really tractable for the human mind to deal with unaided. So we really do need tools like X-Matters to actually cope with this. But what is putting in something like X-Matters done for the business of Viacet?  Well, again, X-Matters enables a lot of opportunity for our DevOps teams to constantly improve. One of the things that I personally like about X-Matters a lot is it's not a centralized tool. A lot of tools in this space are intended for you to be constantly looking at a dashboard or to have an incident captain that's always, you know, their life is that tool. A single glass of paint. Right, but all of these teams have their own single pane of glass that they consume. So we can plug in X-Matters where it's appropriate and allow those tool chains and those automation flows to include X-Matters but not have it be the end-all, be-all of their process. So it helps them improve on all of the other parts of incident management and monitoring. And X-Matters is just there to facilitate those transactions and those workflows. So a lot of value there, a lot of learning opportunities and a lot of enablement for all of our DevOps teams. So you can improve the way that you're doing things without having to rip out everything else and replace it with one new tool. Exactly, you know, one of the things that you don't want to do in any organization is throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. You know, there are tools that can be refined and we see a lot of this in the trend towards microservices, right? Instead of having vendor lock and this huge, you know, one-stop shop for everything, you can pull and replace all of the smaller pieces in that chain without affecting your availability or your ability to respond to an event. Right. Yeah, and one kind of really interesting thing is about these distributed models is you still have places where information needs to wind up. So if I'm working on a particular part of my application and I've got a customer service team that uses Salesforce as their system of choice, I have to get information to Salesforce so they can consume it. It's not okay for me to hoard information. I actually want to make sure that I'm minimizing the friction and moving information along to where it needs to wind up along that process. If I'm a developer, my kind of worldview of my tasks are JIRA, I want to make sure the information winds up there. If I'm in a service management team and I use something like ServiceNow, kind of tracking information there, I have to make information wind up there. If we collaborate in Slack, I have to make sure that it's available within that world as well. So the key thing that we really focused about is every team picks their own flows, they pick their own tools, but the steps along the way are very similar. Something goes wrong, you pull another information, you need help, you need the collaboration step, and you need to basically get the information delivery stage to put information back in the right places because after it's done, to Chris's point, if you just solve the problem very effectively and learn nothing, you've done a bad job, right? Like we kind of have to be clear about that, right? Like learning and improvement is a key part of a successful DevOps transition. And when you're running things at the scale we're talking about at Reinvent, you have to learn. And a key part of that is making sure information winds up in the right places so you're able to do that. Get in them halfway happy, won't cut it, right? Right, I would fully expect that Chris and other customers in Biosat positions would be like, yeah, that's great. We did it great this time, but when it happens again we would have learned nothing. What we do next, exactly. Gentlemen, thank you for the time. We appreciate you sharing your story and wish you success the rest of this week. Enjoy the show. Yeah, thank you very much. Off to a great start, that's for sure. Thank you. Back with more from AWS Reinvent with Justin Moore and I'm John Wall. So you're watching the Q.


What did you do to this one? It broke tolls in it. Janelle, you remembered everything that we did and what did you do to this square? We crumpled it. You crumpled the square? Can we tell everybody? Boys and girls, Mrs. Cleary's friends, look up at Janelle's picture for a minute. Come here, Janelle. Come here. Look at how nice Janelle put her collage together. Okay. And I just want to ask Janelle how she changed some of her squares because I don't see a perfect square anymore. Janelle, can you tell Mrs. Pinara, tell her friends, how did you change this piece of square, this paper? How did you change it? I shredded it. You shredded it. How did you change the red square? It's not perfect anymore. How did you change it? By cutting it. You cut that square. Janelle, what did you do to the purple square? I broke tolls in it. And what did you do to the blue square? I crumpled it. You crumpled the square. I like the way you put all the pieces on your collage. Boys and girls, do you like Janelle's picture? What do you think? Yes. Very nice. Thank you, Janelle. Thank you for sharing. Sean changed all his papers. Sean, I like the way you group them, too. Sean, which group is this? A river. That's the river. But what did you do to the square? It's not. How did you change it? It's blue, but how did you change the square? What tool did you use? Pinscher. Scissors. Thank you, Sean.