Very sad company to work for. - Behavioral Health Technician Caravel Autism Health Employee Review

Lack of Support for Employees. Training has changed so much over the years, it use to be a Senior only could train a behavioral health tech, but as time went on and high turn over rates continued, they began to have techs train each other, at times some techs were new employees as well haven’t even worked 5 months yet and began to train new techs. No higher pay or compensation was given to techs who trained other techs, the most anyone got rewarded was most likely a food or treats. Pay rates were unfair and ridiculous, new hires would be getting paid more than staff that had been there for years with more experience. Increase in wages would be discussed but rarely seen. The clinic was in shambles, and from what I hear from current employees who still work there apparently it still is. The clinic was always a mess, organization was poor, cleaning was way too much for staff to keep up with while working with clients and managing behaviors at the same time. Scheduling was a nightmare for anyone involved. Lunch breaks were only 15 minutes or 30 unpaid and supervisors hated when you would take 30 minute breaks but they’d never outright say it, you could just tell they were annoyed. It was very unfortunate if a client called out you were out of work and pay if you didn’t have relics training to finish, and the company does not offer to pay those lost hours in any way. You use to be able to do admin work however they limited that and staff usually didn’t have anything to do. If you called out sick you’d feel the animosity from scheduling from having to find staff to fill in or tell parents they had to cancel the clients sessions for the day, it was sad however proper precautions never seemed to be taken when illness spread throughout the clinic, parents treated the clinic as a childcare center and would bring their sick children in regardless, spreading the illness or even sometimes rashes which also were rarely taken serious by some managers which was extremely sad as multiple children once got hand foot mouth. We were also informed that lice was not reason enough to send a client home due to psychology well being (as in making sure the child doesn’t feel bullied) due to a book by the CDC or approved by the CDC, which the final decision to keep lice infected clients in the clinic was still made by the company and management as this is a private company, yet Caravel has shown in numerous ways they are more concerned at keeping the clients as they are making money off of them. Caravel is the first behavioral health company of their investors they took on, which in turn they received much financial support, however naturally investors want to make their money back in return, well around 2022-2023 all providers (BCBA’s all the way to Behavioral Health Techs) received an email stating that they would have a company wide goal of increasing learning opportunities, learning opportunities, programs, manding, tasks all =data. This is what I was told by a manager “The company was told by the insurance companies that we weren’t completing enough programs or “data” and if we weren’t then they would stop paying the company as much as they were originally to cover the costs of the treatment for clients”. So the company decided to put out a reward system that if anyone reaches a certain amount of data points then they were reward with things like food, treats, gift cards, and even financial incentives like raises. Well naturally not all employees have integrity which is very sad since we are working with children, and at one point a tech was witnessed multiple times documenting data that was not true, as their client played on the tablet the whole session. At the time techs were able to check each others average data points through central reach, that clients staff had approximately an average of 20-45 data points throughout their sessions, while that one tech had an average of 100… So naturally you can see how that is a problem, data integrity breach and quite literally insurance fr*ud which was reported to management by multiple staff members. Eventually the tech was observed by a newer BCBA who was known for not paying attention all the well anyways and was deemed “fine” or “nothing out of the ordinary” which we all found very hard to believe, that tech was eventually fired later on, I’m not sure what for but it’s for the best to not have a tech like that working there. But the fact that the company didn’t think people would lie about things like that was just so ignorant, but it was obvious they’d cared more about money. And the VP of the Wisconsin clinics was good for nothing her name is Chris and she was also very ignorant as well, she seemed to be of no help when the clinic suffered through so much and the director seemed to need so much more help than what was offered. Many staff made complaints and some tried speaking to her directly but she more so just dismissed the complaints and was of no help. Overtime they began to “graduate” clients sooner than they seemed to need. I was also told by another manager that the director needed to hit a certain goal of new clients each month which was ridiculous because the turn over rate for staff was still high, there was hardly any room for new clients as in the only other decision was to graduate clients sooner than needed which was just so sad. So yeah overall Caravel is a huge disappointment to work for as a company, it seems their main concern in getting clients solely for profit and no longer focused on the mission and values of what the company originally stood for.