What is Positive Behaviour Support?
Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) is a model of care used to support people who show challenging behaviours.
Instead of punishing behaviours, PBS focuses on understanding what is driving a behaviour and offering safer and more useful alternatives. Solutions focus on improving a person’s quality of life and may also include changing a person’s environment or modifying systems that trigger challenging behaviour.
PBS is not a tick-box exercise. It has to be values driven rather than delivered only because it is legislated. It must be led by the individual’s needs and preferences, rights focused, evidence-based (drawing on applied behaviour analysis) and system wide, rather than only trying to change the person.
When done properly, PBS is built around human rights, meaningful participation and long-term skill building. The delivery of quality PBS is also supported by strong training and supervision for practitioners.
What are the issues with PBS in Australia?
During the Disability Royal Commission there was suggestion that PBS hasn’t clearly reduced restrictive practices and that Australia should move away from PBS and towards eliminating restrictions through regulation. However, at Multicap our researchers strongly disagree with this based on their findings.
Often the issues seen with PBS come when something is labelled “PBS”, but it does not follow the core principles of PBS, or when there is limited training and support for the people delivering the service.
Instead, our researchers have shown that the evidence does support PBS. However, there are issues in Australia because of poor PBS implementation and low plan quality.
What happens when PBS is delivered correctly?
There is substantial research to show that when PBS is implemented well it reduces behaviours of concern, improves daily life for people with disability and leads to less use of restrictive practice over time.
What Multicap is doing differently
Multicap is considered an industry leader in Positive Behaviour Support, across both academic contributions and service delivery practice. We have strong checks in place to ensure plan quality and are known for not approving behaviour support plans until they have undergone extensive review and are assessed to be of high quality.
Read the full paper, Carberry, T., Wardale, S., Hutchison, S., Lackey, S., & Vassos, M. (2024). Positive Behaviour Support is effective when implemented correctly: A response to “Restrictive practice–A pathway to elimination” (Spivakovsky, Steele, & Wadiwel, 2023). Research and Practice in Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/23297018.2024.2391804