Clair Driscoll, a Team Coordinator for The Meeting Place in Thera East Anglia, is someone who has always had a strong desire to support and understand people. Her drive to challenge negative perceptions of the people with a learning disability eventually led her to becoming a Positive Behaviour Support (PBS) Coach, a role she is still involved with and enjoying today.
Over the years, Clair has seen the changes in social care and many behaviours that were seen as challenging and complex. Unfortunately, this has sometimes led to labels being put on the people we support and people underestimating their abilities before they were supported by Thera. As a result, their needs were being ignored and unfulfilled. This is what Clair fights against.
Positive behaviour support has proven to be valuable helping the voices of people we support be heard:
Anxious behaviour is the person’s way of communicating distress. It’s on us to look at how we can make changes for the individual. We need to unpick that, find out what they are trying to communicate, think about if we’re doing something to make them communicate in that way, so we can gain understanding.
Clair has seen this first-hand at the Meeting Place. Positive Behaviour Support has enabled a gentleman to become part of his local community and works one day a week in a local charity shop. Another has developed the confidence to use their voice and tell their staff what behaviours help or hinder them when they are annoyed. Clair has seen people struggling and have had their lives turned around with the support of their team and PBS.
This is particularly demonstrated in the life of a gentleman Clair supported, now in his 60s, who had been institutionalised in a hospital after been separated from his family at the age of three.
He’d never had the option of walking in his front door, so he’d climb out of his bedroom window to be able to walk in and out of his front door. That’s such a thing that we will take for granted – that we’ve got a key, so we can get in our front door. And this person had never ever had that option. That always sticks in my mind.
Her experience of working in an institution, drives her in her work.
It’s shocking that people have had to endure this.
This is the life changing impact that Positive Behaviour Support can have on the lives of the people we support. They are regaining control of their lives and shedding the labels others have put on them. Now, they are starting to thrive with the support of people like Clair, who are willing to think outside the box and see them as people and not their anxious behaviour.
Clair loves her role; she comes away with the sense that she’s helped someone and has the opportunity to really understand people. She is keen to continue using PBS in her role , as she says herself:
I just think people should be given opportunities regardless of circumstance.