What is "Behaviour of Concern"
MacIntyre uses the terms behaviour of concern, distress and changed behaviour depending on the person and the situation.
Behaviour of Concern as Communication
We view behaviour as a way of communicating and work hard to understand the message, listen to people and look for a solution. We do this in lots of different ways depending on the person and our agreed role.
When a person is distressed we ask ourselves questions such as ‘What we can do differently?’, ‘How could we change the environment to make it less distressing?’ and ‘What can we do to better understand?’.
We recognise that a change in behaviour may be an attempt to communicate a complaint about MacIntyre’s support. This is recognised and listened to through MacIntyre’s Complaints Policy.
When needed, our skilled local teams and managers are supported to understand the reason for specific behaviours of concern by our specialist team, including PBS, health, autism and communication specialists, or by external professionals and therapists. We work in partnership and agree roles and responsibilities around supporting each person.
We avoid things that might be distressing or traumatising for the person and are aware that these might not be obvious to staff teams without a full understanding of the person. This includes not doing things that the person experiences as aversive, punishing or coercive.
We try to understand the world as the person does by learning more about their life experiences (positive and distressing), how their diagnoses affect them and how they experience the world around them. This helps staff develop empathy and responses based on knowing and understanding the person.
We know how important it is that all records about a person are accurate and are analysed and shared, when appropriate, to help everyone understand the person and their distress better. This includes recording and learning from the positives every day and recording concerns using agreed systems including incident reporting, the health calendar, STAR (setting event, trigger, action, response) charts or monitoring charts. Keeping good records can also avoid unnecessary reassessment of needs – a process which can be distressing for some people.
MacIntyre also uses data locally and nationally to identify problems early and measure the impacts of interventions and training.
MacIntyre’s DNA includes the belief that ‘everyone has the potential to learn’ and we recognise the importance of learning coping skills, life skills and safe ways to communicate needs or distress. We use a range of tools to help the person and their team identify targets and staff are trained to break learning down so that skills are developed slowly and sensitively, avoiding failure or overloading the person.
In MacIntyre, people’s plans focus on the whole person and getting all elements of support right and not just on one target behaviour of concern. Plans are live documents which staff use consistently to guide and continuously develop the way they support.
Read more about our PBS support
Would like to know more?
Send a message to Belinda Bradley, Head of Best Practice
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