Day in a life of a behaviour support practitioner: Austin Ware

Austin is a behaviour support practitioner and team leader at Ability Consultants. Based in the Northern Beaches of Sydney, Austin's experience is centred on working with children and adults with autism, intellectual disabilities and mental health disorders.

7:00am Woken up by my baby girl needing food. Make breakfast for the family and start getting ready for the day.

8:00am Dropping the baby off at daycare and if I am lucky, I might time it well to get a quick surf before starting work.

9:00am Head to my office space and sit down and get into any burning issues.

9:30am Jump into an online meeting with my mentee to discuss future clients and reflect on how it is going with the ones they have by using the PSR sheet.

10:30am Get up for a break then drink more water. Then get prepared with questions, assessments and documents for a new participant's initial meeting.

11:00am Jump into an online initial stakeholders meeting with a new participant and supporters. Find out the client likes going to the beach and start thinking of strategies to get them to try surfing ;)

12noon After the meeting I start to fill in my assessments (QOL, RPA, Behaviour checklist) and meeting notes from the initial stakeholders meeting.

1:00pm Get out and grab a sushi roll and relax in the sun for 30min.

1:30pm Get prepared with a notepad, a pen and questions to ask at my next meeting with a participant and their supporters face to face. I jump in the car and turn up the music and follow the car’s GPS to my destination.

2:00pm I arrive at the participant’s residency, introduce myself and then proceed to get to know the participant and their supporters with person centred questions.

3:00pm Finish up with all my questions and talk about when we will meet next. I leave the participant’s home feeling like I had a good connection with the participant.

3:30pm Arrive back at my office just in time to get a piece of chocolate. Then I see that I have an email from a school to visit a participant. I call the school to set up the next meeting.

4:00pm I see there are 10 email data entries received and I begin to plug in the data into my chart. I see that my participant has been having a rough week. After I enter the data I call the house manager to see how things are going for them and the participant. It sounds like the participant has been having trouble at their day program with another participant, so I book in time to have a 1:1 with the participant at the end of the week.

4:30pm I leave my office space to go grab my baby at daycare so we can head home to play, eat, bathe and sleep. Yah!

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Image by @sproutdaily.