Positive Behaviour Support

Positive Behaviour Support is central to the care that we provide at Richardson Care – both for adults with learning disabilities and those with an acquired brain injury.

Positive Behaviour Support is the prevention and reduction of challenging behaviour, whilst focussing on improved quality of life, inclusion, participation and support of valued social roles. We work in a structured way and focus on the individual’s strengths and their protective factors, which helps to prevent incidents of behaviour that challenges.

Plan

Each person has their own Positive Behaviour Support Plan and the service user is involved as much as possible in creating their own plan. It includes information about their likes and dislikes, what makes them feel calm and happy, and what makes them feel anxious, or triggers any challenging behaviour.

The Plan is an active document, so it can be updated and amended whenever required.

The Positive Behaviour Support Plan includes the following:

1. How to keep the service user well
2. If they become unwell, how to contain precipitant factors
3. How to identify a crisis situation and how to contain the crisis
4. How to help them get out of the crisis

This consistent approach followed by all members of the individual’s care team enables us to see which techniques are best to use and then adapt our strategies accordingly.

Person-centred care

Because everyone is different there will be different precipitant factors for each individual, and different ways to identify or contain a crisis. Our person-centred approach means that everyone has their own individual Positive Behaviour Support Plan. The plan is instrumental in the person’s everyday life. It aims to facilitate the development of their own goals and helps them work towards them. It also aims to help them to develop new skills and become active and valued members of their community.

Positive Behaviour Tool

Consultant Clinical Psychologist, Dr Pedro Areias Grilo, along with the Assistant Psychologists at Richardson Care, has developed an innovative tool for identifying and measuring positive behaviours in neurorehabilitation. Traditionally, an individual’s progress has been often measured using a variety of tools such as OAS-MNR, SASBA, SASNOS and FIM+FAM. However, these do not capture the positive pro-social behaviours that an individual presents.  The Positive Behaviour Tool can capture positive verbal, social, emotional-behavioural and physical interaction.

The Positive Behaviour Tool has the following benefits:

• Monitoring the frequency and type of positive behaviours presented by individuals gives us clear data that can be used to indicate progress.
• It supports clinicians to explore what precipitates positive behaviour and therefore how we can reinforce more positive behaviours
• This clinical information will inform care and treatment plans
• As it can be used as positive reinforcement and will capture service users’ progress, it will guide them through the process of self-actualisation

This is a novel idea within psychology and rehabilitation settings, and we are pleased to support Pedro and the team in this research. We are committed to enhancing the quality of life of the service users in our care and developing and implementing new clinical approaches to achieve this.

It is hoped that by gaining a greater understanding of individual positive behaviours, care plans and treatment guidelines can be specifically designed to encourage and promote positive behaviour. This research is currently being prepared for submission to the NHS Ethics Board, which will allow further research into this area. The Positive Behaviour Tool is copyrighted.