What a Participant Needs From Their SIL Team and Their Practitioner

She has lived in the same house for six years and seen more than forty support workers come through the front door.

She knows the creak of the third floorboard. She knows which kitchen cupboard sticks. She has learned the name of every worker, and learned to say goodbye to most of them. Her behaviour support plan is one of the few things meant to carry her across all those changes. It's supposed to make sure worker forty-one knows what worker one learned.

That only works when the SIL team and the practitioner build it together.

Why SIL teams are the experts on what happens on shift

Practitioners visit. SIL teams are there at 7am when breakfast goes sideways, at 4pm when the day program bus is late, and at 3am when nobody else is awake. They know which strategies are realistic and which ones look lovely on paper and fall apart at dinner.

That knowledge gives SIL providers real authority. In my experience, many SIL teams underestimate how much permission they have to question a practitioner. You can push back, and you should. Every question you ask on her behalf makes the plan more likely to work in her actual life.

8 questions to ask your behaviour support practitioner

Print these and bring them to the next meeting.

1.       How will we know the plan is being implemented with fidelity? Fidelity means the plan is followed the way it was intended. What does that look like day to day, and how will we check?

2.       Were our workers involved in writing it? Which shifts did you speak to? Night staff and weekend staff often know different versions of her.

3.       Was she involved? How did you find out what she wants, likes and finds hard? What did she say?

4.       Have you trained the team in person, or sent a PDF? Plans land when workers practise them together and can ask questions.

5.       What should this look like on a hard shift? Two workers, one of them new, a fire alarm test and a late bus. Walk us through it.

6.       What data do you need from us? Keep it simple enough that workers can record it without stepping away from her.

7.       How quickly will we review when something isn't working? Three months is a long time to live with a strategy that makes her day harder.

8.       Is life getting better for her? Fewer incidents is one measure. More outings, more choices, more laughter and more time doing what she loves are the measures she'd care about.

What good partnership looks like for the person

When SIL teams and practitioners work well together, she feels it as consistency. The same calm response from every worker. A morning routine that fits how she wakes up. A plan that changes when her life changes, because the team noticed and the practitioner listened.

When the partnership is weak, she feels that too. Every new worker becomes an experiment. Strategies change with the roster. She ends up doing most of the adapting.

The best practitioners want SIL teams asking hard questions. If a practitioner gets defensive about question 8, that tells you something.

What to do this week

Choose one resident and one question from the list. Ask it at your next contact with their practitioner. Write down the answer and share it with the team. Small, regular questions build a much stronger plan than one big complaint at review time.

Common questions

Can a SIL provider request a review of a behaviour support plan?

Yes. If a plan isn't working or circumstances have changed, raise it with the practitioner and the person's support coordinator.

What is implementation fidelity in behaviour support?

How closely a plan is carried out as intended, across workers and shifts. Good practitioners help teams measure it in simple ways.

Who should attend behaviour support plan training?

As many regular workers as possible, across all shifts, plus house leaders. Recording the session helps new staff catch up.

Bring us in

If you lead a SIL team, we deliver free in-person PBS training built around your house and your residents. Email Aaron at aaron@bespokebehaviour.com.au to book. Thinking about a referral? Talk to us first at intake@bespokebehaviour.com.au.

Stories in this post are composites, shared with details changed to protect privacy.