We continue to have lots of interest in the PBS Competence
Framework, with 4889 page views to date. We know people are particularly interested
in the additional resources we are currently developing to help put the
competencies into practice. We plan to make these freely available on our
BlogSpot this Autumn but in the meantime thought we would give you a flavour of
what is to come!
As you will be aware from previous blogs, we have been working
with 5 different target groups. In June and July, each group met to review
existing PBS and other guidelines and materials, identify gaps, consider
current context and decide what kind of resource they felt would be helpful to
produce.
Since then we have been busy drafting the proposed resources
and have summarised these below.
People with learning
disabilities – not surprisingly this group wanted to focus on outcomes of
PBS. They said they were not really concerned about what it is and how it is
defined, but that they wanted PBS to offer them a good quality of life. In
essence this meant they wanted to live somewhere they liked, choose to do
things with friends and family in places like everyone else, be treated with
respect and kindness, be supported as individuals to develop skills and
interests and to be involved in planning and changing their support. Their
resource will be an interactive one and will provide a means to help them express
their views about these things. It will be very visual and use easy read words.
We are going to be road testing this with people with learning disabilities at
our next workshop on 26th October.
Service Providers
– this group agreed there is lots of guidance already available detailing what services
need to do to provide good quality PBS as well as guidance on specific issues
such as positive handling. However, there is so much information around best
practice, including some recommendations, which have become regulatory
requirements, that for smaller organisations in particular it is hard to ensure
that all are linked together and embedded into practice. The resource being developed
for providers does this work for them: it summarises the key recommendations
from those policy guidelines that have been identified by the group as the most
important and puts these into a suggested policy framework. Services will be
able to use this to help develop organisation-wide policies that embed PBS into
practice. Each policy area has key points identified with signposts to relevant
documents and guidance. This group meets again in London on 2nd
October.
Commissioners –
this group reviewed current guidance and again felt that there is plenty of
guidance that already exists and that a lot of it is good quality. Yet there
are significant barriers and perverse incentives in achieving effective
commissioning. We agreed to focus on the areas of commissioning which we felt
we could influence immediately. These were resources that front line reviewers
of placements could use when monitoring /looking for a placement offering PBS,
including:
- Some standard wording about PBS to be included
in service specifications,
- Some screening questions which help identify
those people who are vulnerable to developing challenging behaviour and who would
benefit from a PBS approach from their placement
- A guide to help care managers/social workers
look for a good quality PBS service
A further workshop is planned on 17th September.
Direct Support
Workers - this group met in Bristol
and clearly identified the crucial role they play in the delivery of PBS to the
people they work closely with. They wanted a resource, which acknowledges and identifies
to others the key role they play in PBS delivery and what support staff need
from their organisation in order to effectively deliver this. We will meet up
in Bristol again on 29th October.
Parents and Carers
– in this workshop we talked at length about how parents/carers can ensure that
the service their relative receives is based on good quality PBS. All too
frequently they feel they have the “wool pulled over their eyes” by services,
who are not really skilled in PBS. Parents and carers want a tool to help them
identify what “good” PBS looks like and how they can ask the right questions in
order to find this out. In addition they were keen to know how they could increase
their own skills through formal and informal training and how to access funding
for this. Parents & carers will review the draft resource on 29th
September.
All of the groups identified issues around training in PBS
as a major concern: availability of training, accessing training, knowing what
good training looks like, accreditation, training that is tailored for specific
user groups. Whilst we may not be able to address all of these concerns within
the resources being developed at this stage, the discussions around training
have helped inform some of the ideas that have come about.
Please email us with any comments or questions or simply to
let us know how your service is making use of the PBS Competence Framework pbscoalition@gmail.com
