Victoria Houchin, BDM for Training Alliance (Cerebral Palsy Alliance) introduces Positive Behaviour Support training as an eLearning course for disability support practitioners.

“Positive Behaviour Support (PBS), the evidence informed approach to supporting people with disability is constantly referred to when we speak about the way in which we work under NDIS. Providers are assessed against their ability to actively promote and implement PBS in their organisations by auditors and all staff are expected to know what PBS is and why we use it, as well as how it applies to the people they support as individuals.

Surprisingly, there are still many disability support practitioners who cannot answer the question “What is positive behaviour support?”.

 As a Registered Training Organisation (RTO), Training Alliance has been working with teams within Cerebral Palsy Alliance as well as our customer organisations for some time to discover ways of training PBS that are more innovative, time efficient and effective. I have spent months working with customers and running focus groups to get down to the real detail about what we actually want and need as an industry that will support with this gap we seem to have in understanding about PBS amongst our direct support staff.

Together with our partners at Kineo, we have found that it is possible to successfully teach the fundamentals of PBS, in a short eLearning course by harnessing powerful interactive learning tools. This course provides a time efficient and highly effective means to provide our staff with the core knowledge of PBS.

The course highlights the importance of quality of life as well as positive and preventative strategies to behaviour support and includes a range of scenarios and activities to keep the learners engaged.”

This course has been developed to exemplify the positive behaviour support approach which focusses on addressing the needs of a person with a disability, and on improving their quality of life. The idea of the course is to introduce these concepts to disability support workers and to encourage them to use positive approaches to behaviour support in their work.

This course provides an understanding of:

• the meaning of ‘quality of life’ and how to apply strategies to improve the quality of life for the people you support
• what the positive behaviour support framework is, why we use it and how to apply the framework in your everyday work life
• how to recognise and implement proactive strategies when presented with behaviours of concern, as well as analyse the function of the behaviour, and
• the impact of communication and the importance of understanding both verbal and non-verbal communication.

The Unit ID is 30475.