7.15am: Make a cuppa, open up the laptop ready for an early morning Zoom call.

7:30am: Log in to the Zoom meeting, the meeting is about the Teenage and Young Adult Palliative Care study day training I am involved in delivering in partnership with a Children’s Palliative Care Network. We are meeting this morning to catch up and discuss each of our roles for the day, planning for how we are anticipating the training to go and to make sure we are not overlapping so that the training day is full of useful information, insight and learning for the attendees to go away with and consider when working in their environments. It is not even 8am and I am being referenced as a sex expert – this made me laugh! To be clear my part in the training is to talk about Sex, Sexuality and Identity.

8:30am: Check through emails, prioritise what needs to be done today and check what I have planned.

9am: Attend the Care Team handover, a chance to hear about what is happening in the hospice and find out if there are any young people that are in and/or need any youth work support. It is also a chance to share information with colleagues around work that I am doing with any young people who might be in the Hospice, or on the radar out in the community.

9:30am: Time for another cuppa to enjoy whilst attending the Transitions/Young People’s Team meeting. This meeting is chance to discuss young people that, as a team, we are currently supporting. It is a way of ensuring we all have the most up to date information, that we are aware of other agencies that are involved in supporting these young people and if there are any challenges or concerns, we problem solve as a team. This meeting enables us to be more aware, to be efficient in our practice and to communicate with the wider to team to address the needs of the young people we support.

11am: Meeting with external youth organisation, meeting other youth workers in health based environments to discuss what has been happening, how things are going, some of the challenges. Being able to discuss and share good practice enabling us to help each other to problem solve and consider new ways of working. A chance to consider ways we can work together, share resources and develop new ways of supporting young people who access services across the organisations. Importantly for me it is a chance to chat to other youth workers, people who get the role and everything that comes with that. This is invaluable in the support it offers me professionally and I always feel inspired to keep developing the service I offer at Rainbows and implementing new ideas.

12:30pm: Lunch 😊 at this point I am starting to regret agreeing to the early morning meeting but am feeling positive with my productive day so far!

1pm: Email and text reminder to the young people about the Young Adult Social Group taking place later today.

1:15pm: Home Visit to see a young person for one to one support. Arranged to meet young person at home, this is session four out of a planned six. The session, as led by the young person, is focussing on coping strategies for when this young person is feeling like they are having a tough day. We explore who is important to them, what their support framework looks like and introduce new resources that may be useful. We then identified different types of strategies this young person can use in order to help them manage their feelings on difficult days, we explore how they can help and what the possible outcomes might be. We discuss what they might want to focus on next time and plan a date and time to meet again, I leave the visit and head to my home office.

4pm: Develop an informal session plan for the Zoom session with the young people, gather information and spend time thinking about how I can share in an engaging and fun way. Thinking about different types of activities, the resources I might need and preparing it all for the session later.

4:45pm:  Tea break, chance to have five minutes away from the computer and stretch my legs

5pm: Young Adult Social Group, where six young people have joined the online Zoom session. We have a general catch up and check in with everyone to see how they are all doing, talking about all the things they have been up to since last week. One young person was sharing their driving dramas, another was talking about a music gig they went to, one young person was talking about the ups and downs of being a football supporter, one shared updates on their music making progress. Another shared some of the challenges he was having with care and the impact this was having on him being able to get out and about. So it was quite a varied and diverse conversation, which is great. We then started to talk about the theme of the session today which is Mental Health. All the young people contributed to the discussions and activities and fed back how much they enjoyed the session and learnt from each other and felt more aware of the positive and negative impacts of mental health.

6:30pm: Wrap up the Zoom session, record any relevant information and reflect on the session. Make notes of anything that needs to be followed up.

7pm: Check what I have got on tomorrow, write a to do list, reflect on the busy and productive day, close the laptop down and switch off for the day.