Pros
Gardner is well known in the San Jose community and serves a population whose mental health often gets overlooked. There are good, bright individuals all throughout the agency who just need to find each other.
Cons
The Behavioral Health Dept. at Gardner scares me in how little it cares about the wellness of its therapists. It seems like current leadership is more comfortable burning out its line staff with patchwork solutions than addressing the consequences of long-standing issues head on. As a therapist, I was made to feel like the agency was constantly on the verge of closing my program and that my worth as a clinician was solely based on my ability to meet Productivity and keep my program open. There was no consideration for the fact that meeting productivity often required me to have compromise my time, my potential growth, and my personal health. I’ll start with something as basic as adhering to program expectations around attendance. Clients sign a contract stating that inconsistent attendance is grounds for possible discharge. That’s pretty standard across the field — and yet that foundational concept of respecting our time as clinicians is already disregarded. Colleagues and I have felt pressure to chase after clients that no-show sessions, either taking them even though they’re more than 15 minutes late or go so far as to call them up to have an impromptu session for however long just to have billable minutes. Not only did this reinforce that clients don’t have to face the consequences of being inconsistent, but also showed that they don’t have to respect our time because we don’t respect it ourselves. When my clients would get into a habit of no-showing, management’s solution was to increase my caseload by 20% to account for the no-shows so I could still meet productivity. What this meant was I had a caseload that would hover around 26-28 clients. That’s literally 5-6 clients scheduled a day. Put supervision, team meetings, and traveling into the community on top of that — it’s no wonder the lunch room is empty, no one has time to take a break. And when you consider how documentation is now non-billable by CalAIMS (which I also HATE!!), there was this underlying message that writing notes must stay a priority cause its how the agency got paid but not a priority enough to have protected time to do them. I would work overtime almost every day just to get my progress notes done. Once my notes started showing up late because of pure burnout, management required me to route my notes to them for approval which meant getting my notes in even FASTER in order to meet Medi-Cal’s 3-day deadline. At a certain point, with the number of clients I was being asked to take on, the speed I was being asked to write my notes, and the amount of personal time I was inherently being asked to give up, it felt like I was being pushed to a breaking point. There’s a lot more I can say about the issues at Gardner’s Behavioral Health Dept. But my conclusion is this — at the end of the day, Gardner is a business that operates on individual fear. They’re not interested in keeping you long term or investing in your growth, both personally and clinically. Associate level therapists are seen as cheap, disposable labor and they’re not afraid to run through you and burn you out just to keep the lights on. If you have to work here, get your clinical hours and then get out. You deserve a workplace that practices what it preaches.