Iris Care Group is wholly committed to the person-centred principles of positive behavioural support. The majority of people referred to us for treatment and support have a history of behaviours of concern, so all our services take a structured approach to the development of behaviour support plans. The journey starts before admission or move in, where our teams prepare an initial support plan using information from the persons previous services, families and carers as appropriate.
Each of our services has its own process for doing this work appropriate to the type of setting and client group. Each service acts in accordance with our central ‘promoting positive behaviour’ and ‘reducing restrictive practices’ policies.
Everyone coming to our services has a provisional behaviour support plan in place within 72 hours of admission. This must be co-produced with the person wherever possible. Over time, a full behaviour support plan based on relevant assessments is completed. We do not just take a traditional behaviour analytic approach to positive behaviour support. Given the range of services we offer we need to include a range of assessments and methods of engagement that are appropriate for the person, matched to both their abilities and their individual clinical profile. We see positive behaviour support as a way of structuring evidence-based care and support plans that help both the people in our care, and our staff teams, to receive and deliver the right support, in the right way, at the right time.
The use of and review of the support plan is fundamental to the way we deliver our services in all our service. All disciplines provide input into it, to make sure that it is a truly multidisciplinary document, making sure that all aspects of someone’s care are written down in a plan that they and staff understand. Our multi-discipline and multi-specialist approach to PBS means that each service has its own method of positive monitoring in place to support quality evaluation – ranging from direct observations of care to co-produced feedback sessions to check service user satisfaction with the way we are delivering care. All our monthly MDT templates include a mandatory detailed support plan review involving the service user
The organisation is proud to have its own governance structure to monitor effective behavioural support that goes above and beyond regulatory requirement. This includes our own method for restrictive practice reviews that provided an additional layer of governance over and above routine debrief and learning following all incidents where restrictive practices are used. The organisation has delivered workshops in national restraint reduction conferences to disseminate this work and its clinical team have published and presented widely in the areas of restraint reduction and the use of positive behavioural support in multiple clinical specialisms
