Supervising quality care at CES: Ceirra Burnham

CES adds a layer of support for our Direct Service Professionals to ensure our care to adults with disabilities meets the gold standard.

Ceirra helps Gail Ute settle into the morning activities at the Lander based Gary Hudson center.

When she was 19 Ceirra knew she wanted to be a caregiver and began a career in the field of directly helping people live their best lives.

Originally from Arizona, like many people in Lander she moved here with her parents and fell in love with the locals and environment.

Ceirra Burnham has worked as an administrator and Direct Service Professional for CES for about a year. With 4 children and a soldier partner, she's living the dream: helping other people at work, at home, and civically.

"I worked for the State school and various other homes for the disabled or elderly around town before coming to CES".

Ceirra with her other half National Guardsman Kreymer Aurand, and one of her daughters. She assists clients in Lander's Gary Hudson Center.

"CES has been so rewarding for me. The staff, the clients really make the difference. One time I was helping a client who was crying because he needed a new wheelchair when suddenly he perked up and saw the bright side before I did and became cheerful because he felt loved and listened to. This sort of thing is why it's easy to have a good day at CES."

Ceirra, mom of 4 children, loves coming to work at the Gary Hudson center in Lander on north 3rd street. What draws her? The clients.

Beginning as a Direct Service Professional, she now works as a day-habilitation coordinator over the center's operation, ensuring all the other DSPs are supported and each shift covered round the clock for all those who need care. She helps organize trips - like the annual pic nic or trips to go fishing, to summer camp and other events where clients are transported into the community.

This often involves juggling schedules with full and part time staff, overtime, and occasionally calling on other staff to come in to cover a shift - even at night.

But her first love is the clients. "Paper work and scheduling is important but what drives me to come to work are the people."

Ceirra enjoys spending time with clients like Yolanda Dewey at the Lander Gary Hudson center.

Community Entry Services provides clients with Direct Service Professionals to assist them according to their level of care needs... for some this means just day-habilitation or occasional checkups. For other clients it involves 24/7 care.

In addition to Direct Service Professionals, each facility also has several more support staff which include a person devoted to handling client medical appointments, a person like Ceirra helping coordinate the DSPs' schedules, and a person devoted to ensuring overall quality control of service like Lander's own Mike Aurand featured here.

The goal is to create a culture of excellence and attention to detail where each individual client's current needs are tended to and their overall health is tracked and measured to ensure problems are addressed immediately rather than be left to fester.

This is all part of what it takes to provide a gold standard of care to our fellow Wyoming citizens. Ceirra sums it up best:

"My quality of life is improved by being around them, and seeing how they deal with the cards they've been dealt. They are some of the best people I know and I feel great about working with them." (Ceirra Burnham)