Positive Behaviour Support

Positive Behaviour Support transforms your quality of life by building new support strategies, skills and behaviours to meet your needs and goals.

We build a Plan with you, and your team, in partnership. It is based on understanding:

Your existing routines, values, social connections and personal strengths

Any behaviour that is a challenge for you right now

Your needs and finding new ways to meet those needs that don't require challenging behaviour

Positive behaviours and skills you aim to develop to meet the goals that matter to you

Ability Consultants has a detailed Functional Assessment Interview form. You, or a person who knows you very well, can complete this online, as one of many ways to participate in the development of your Behaviour Support Plan.

Ability Consultants process

Fill in an online Referral Form.

Review and sign your online Service Agreement (we aim to respond within 7 working days).

You (or a person who knows you very well) provide background documents and complete our Functional Assessment Interview form.

We conduct initial interviews, document and data review, observations and interactions (Our current wait time to connect with a clinician is {Check Website Wait Time} days once we have received a signed Service Agreement.)

We always start with a Quality of Life assessment. We assess your strengths, risks, and goals, and whether there may be a restrictive practice in place.

If a Restrictive Practice is found, we develop a draft Interim Behaviour Support Plan and circulate it to you and your team for feedback.

Once you are happy with it we submit this to the NDIS Commission, if it includes Restrictive Practices.

This process takes 10 to 20 hours--if this uses all your NDIS funding, we provide a letter to the NDIA to help fund the next steps.

We provide training and coaching to you, your key support people and your family.

We listen to your ongoing feedback, review your data, and update the Behaviour Plan.

If you have 35 or more NDIS hours, we provide a Comprehensive Behaviour Support Plan. This includes a Functional Behaviour Assessment and:

Function-based Proactive strategies to improve your quality of life:

Environmental strategies,
Skill development strategies,
Focused strategies.

Reactive strategies to increase safety and rapidly sooth challenging behaviour incidents.
Data collection systems to allow ongoing review (e.g. mobile app, or paper form).

At the closure of every service, we provide a letter of recommendation, to help you obtain from the NDIS the right level of ongoing support. The NDIA wants evidence to show how reasonable and necessary your support needs are. We are experts in the collection, analysis and delivery of this evidence.

Your behaviour support and lifestyle goals are clearly defined.

Together we build a plan and build the skills to meet these goals.

Your progress towards these goals is measured and delivered to the NDIA in a compelling report.

Behaviour Support Strategies

Challenging Behaviour often leads to your life being shut down. Positive Behaviour Support is primarily about improving your quality of life, and a reduction in Challenging Behaviour.

Challenging Behaviour is a mismatch in your social or physical environment and your ability to navigate that environment. Sometimes it is the environment that needs changing, sometimes you need new skills.

It could still be that you struggle to manage strong emotions, sensations or thoughts. Or maybe you struggle to communicate your needs verbally. Or maybe you have learned certain ways of getting your needs met that make yourself or other people feel unsafe. Positive Behaviour Support is about understanding the history and the current reason for the things you do, and learning safer behaviours and support strategies that fulfil the same need.

While learning new safer behaviours, you need support from people who can rapidly meet your needs before things get too scary. You need people who can intervene early to give a supportive and calm response to prevent unsafe behaviour. And those people need to know how to keep you and themselves safe if the episode does escalate.

You need a Behaviour Support Plan to guide each of these processes, and people need to work with you to develop this Plan. You need effective induction of new people, training and ongoing communication within your team.

Psychology Services

Some of the Behaviour Support Practitioners on our team are Psychologists.

Psychologists at Ability Consultants may provide additional services:

Assessments of

Cognitive functioning
Adaptive Functioning
Diagnosable mental health issues

Psychotherapy to help with mental health or behavioural issues

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy
Dialectical Behaviour Therapy
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy
Therapy to improve executive functioning (e.g. impulse control, emotion control, flexible thinking, working memory, self-monitoring, planning and prioritising, task initiation, organisation)

We do not provide Psychology or Behaviour Support services at a clinic, we come to you: your home, school, work, day program or a place in the community to suit you.

Please make a note on your referral form if you need psychology services of this type.

We provide face-to-face psychology services in NSW. We also provide psychology services Australia-wide via telehealth.

referral form

Restrictive Practices and Safeguarding

You have the same rights as other people. If you are living with a disability it is possible that your support people may at some point restrict your free access to the things you own or want, give you medication without your consent, restrict your freedom to move and your freedom to access the community. In Positive Behaviour Support we seek to minimise or end restrictive practices. Wherever possible we develop with you, plans to safely fade the restrictive practice, and restore your rights.

We watch the use of restrictive practices through Restricted Practices Authorisation (RPA) panels. All disability services must carry out an RPA process if they use any of the Restricted Practices, defined in the NDIS Quality and Safeguarding legislation.

Funding

If you have an NDIS Plan with Behaviour Support or Improved Relationships, that is the correct funding. We may also be able to use a limited amount of Core or Improved Daily Living funding to build a report to help you obtain the correct funding.

We work with NDIA Managed, Plan Managed and Self-Managed customers.

We are specialists in Positive Behaviour Support