Stepping Out Blog

Placement Breakdowns & Challenging Behaviour

Stepping Out has recently been inundated with referrals, mainly young people and adults displaying challenging behaviour. It seems these referrals are being made after various placement breakdowns have taken place. Stepping Out continues to support the ideology that prevention is the key to ensuring a placement is successful.

Important factors when choosing a provider for clients displaying severe challenging behaviour:

• Is the house staffed 24 hours per day?
• How many service users does the property accommodate? (less is more)
• Does the provider have a good track record with supporting certain client types?
• Does the placement provide professionals with regular reports and updates?
• Is the placement cost effective?
• Are the staff well trained and experienced?
• Is the provider regulated by a specific regulatory body? (CQC)
• Is the provider flexible and do they have the resources to continue to meet the client’s needs?
• Does the provider have good knowledge of reporting disclosures and safeguarding issues?
• Does the provider have a dedicated out of hours emergency team? Is the team able to travel to a project out of hours if necessary?
• Are you seeing positive outcomes, or more challenging behaviour?
• Do you know why an incident occurred? What were the triggers? Do you know what the client’s thoughts were?

Stepping Out work with various local authorities on a national scale and offer small, homely, semi-independent living projects staffed 24 hours per day and accommodate no more than 5 service users per project. Our risk assessments ensure that many incidents are prevented and our polices are continually updated in order to reduce incidents occurring!

Example Incident: Service user alleges that his Laptop was stolen by another service user, an incident occurs causing a placement breakdown; the laptop may not have existed.
Stepping Out’s Solution: All service users must sign a valuable belongings policy, stating their possessions, a staff member must confirm that these possessions exist. This policy is updated regularly in order for us to keep record of any new valuable items. False allegations pertaining to the loss of valuable items are greatly reduced.

Working to reduce placement breakdowns:
Usually a placement breaks down because a client is involved in an incident and or the client displays behaviour that could not be managed, reduced.
Stepping Out ensures their staff members pay regular attention to potential triggers and any patterns that may form prior to an incident. We cannot guarantee an incident will not occur, however Stepping Out will work to find out why the incident occurred, take note of the triggers and engage the client directly, we are open minded and use a relaxed approach. Our clients will be challenging and we are aware of that, therefore we must engage with them so that we are able to ascertain why the client became challenging. Our experienced approach usually means a client will inform us that they caused this incident because of x, y or z, they may even tell us what the exact triggers were and in most cases will highlight how regularly occurring incidents can be reduced.  Making a placement with Stepping Out will ensure you know as much as possible about the client and their needs.

In order to make a placement with Stepping Out, please contact us on 020 8342 7217.