What is SUPPORT
SUPPORT is a program of aggression prevention and management for those staff, parents, agencies, and individuals who support children and adults in a variety of environments who exhibit challenging behaviors that may prove dangerous to themselves or others.
The trainings focus on three inter-connected areas: The prevention or elimination of challenging behaviors, the de-escalation of challenging behaviors, and safely responding to challenging behaviors. Our goal is to provide training that emphasizes the most effective behaviorally-based clinical practices to teach alternate behaviors, physical response techniques that maintain safety for all concerned, and an adherence to all state and federal regulations regarding the use of Restraint and Seclusion for children and adults.
Why Choose SUPPORT
There are many programs, local and national, that provide training in aggression prevention and management. Some place an emphasis on the regulation of triggers to reduce aggression, while others rely heavily on intrusive physical responses. Many offer only a small number of physical techniques, while some attempt to dictate exactly what staff must do clinically and physically, assuming a one-size-fits-all approach, without regard to individual needs and circumstances.
SUPPORT believes that the primary goal of working with individuals with challenging behaviors is to teach them the adaptive and communication skills that will reduce or eliminate his/her need to exhibit these behaviors. It teaches why people exhibit disruptive and aggressive behaviors and why we should respond rationally as opposed to emotionally to his/her behavioral excesses. SUPPORT also focuses on intervening early to de-escalate or re-direct aggressive behaviors and on how to safely physically stop injurious behaviors, without risking additional injury to all person’s involved.
As you will read in the History of SUPPORT section of this site, this behaviorally-based training program has been developed and revised over nearly forty years by clinicians, direct care staff, and others to ensure the effectiveness of its prevention strategies and the safety and effectiveness of its physical techniques.
There are over forty physical strategies in the SUPPORT program. This allow us to determine exactly what your specific needs are and to tailor a training to meet those needs. We have also intentionally limited the amount of trainings that we do to ensure the quality of those trainings by individuals with extensive behavioral and clinical experiences. We are good at training these strategies and techniques because we use them daily in our clinical practice.