If you require mental health crisis support, please contact your local mental health services, your GP, or telephone 111 or the emergency services.

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Introduction

Positive Behavioural Support (PBS) is an approach which is embedded in government policy. It is at the heart of the Department of Health policy document ‘Positive and Proactive Care’ published in April 2014. Positive Behavioural Support has a strong evidence-base related to an increase in quality of life and reduced occurrence, severity or impact of behaviours of concern.

This course offers an introduction to the Positive Behavioural Support model which is being used increasingly in mental health services. The Mental Health Code of Practice provides guidance on safe and therapeutic responses to behaviour of concern.

Positive behavioural support plans are one way of providing individualised assessments, as well as care plans or treatment plans which include all elements of a persons care. Positive Behavioural Support is an opportunity to bring together all the people involved in someone’s care, including staff, families and carers. One of the main aims of Positive Behavioural Support is to reduce the use of restrictive interventions through early recognition, de-escalation, debriefing and learning lessons.

Positive Behavioural Support is presented as a move away from the medical model to a more recovery focussed and holistic model. It involves an extensive assessment process that looks at the whole situation, engaging all opinions, viewpoints and possibilities. The assessment and formulation process aims to find ways to understand what is going on, creating hypotheses which are used to create a plan. One of the main concepts of Positive Behavioural Support is that everyone is working together to improve a person’s quality of life.

Did you know that every behaviour that challenges can be understood, too, as a form of communication that we can understand.

Aims

We hope that by the end of this course you will:

  • Have an increased understanding of the positive behavioural support model.
  • Have an understanding of the roles people have in developing positive behavioural support plans.
  • Know what to expect if you are offered positive behavioural support.