What is Positive Behaviour Support?
Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) is a person-centred framework for supporting people in situations where challenging behaviour is present, or where there is a risk of it. As an evidence-based approach, its primary goal is to improve a person’s quality of life — with a secondary goal of reducing the frequency and severity of behaviours of concern.
Challenging behaviour is persistent behaviour that puts the safety of the person or others at risk, or that limits someone’s ability to live a good life. But behaviour is also a message. It can tell us something important about a person and the quality of their life — often, it’s an attempt to communicate an unmet need.
Positive Behaviour Support takes a comprehensive approach to assessment, planning and intervention, focusing on the person’s needs, their environment and their overall quality of life. It means working with families, carers and the important people in someone’s life to build a shared understanding of why a person may need to use challenging behaviour — and how, together, we can change that.
How Positive Behaviour Support can help
- Helping the person be understood, through new communication strategies.
- Adjusting the person’s environment — for example, in their home — so they feel more at ease.
- Enriching the person’s lifestyle with community connections and activities they genuinely enjoy.
- Building meaningful, positive relationships with others.
- Creating an encouraging, fun and understanding support environment.
