[humanser] Tricks for acute client care and establishing rapport

[Kaiti Shelton]

Hi all,

Tomorrow I will have the first session of my fourth practicum!  This
semester I will be at an acute treatment facility for women and men
detoxing/recovering from substance abuse-I'm on the women's unit.
I'll have plenty of support from my partner as well as a very
knowledgeable and experienced supervisor, but I want to do my part to
establish rapport with the clients.  To this point I've mostly had the
same clients for an entire semester, but in this setting the program
is only 28 days long and extensions of only a few extra days aren't
given to every client.  As part of my orientation I was able to
observe a processing group and met some of the women there.  So far
I've only had very positive reactions with the women and they've
seemed to understand why I might want to confirm who I'm speaking to a
bit more than the average person, but with so many clients coming and
going at different times I'm looking for tricks that might help me do
the often little things that help to initially establish rapport a
little better, like learning names and remembering things about each
client.  Groups will usually be about 8 to 10 in size, but I guess the
frequency at which the pool of clients might change and the need to
constantly be in assessment mode are making me think that I should
seek out other tricks, tips, and life hacks for establishing rapport
when visual cues aren't always there to jog memory.

Any tidbits of information are appreciated and welcome.  Acute care is
something new to me and is very different from having 4 months to work
with clients, so I'll take all the advice I can get.