Building Your Implementation Workforce With Support Network

This series has consistently made the argument that outcomes of behaviour support are determined more by the machinery for implementation than by plan authorship, by consistency, by the training system, by the selection of workers, by the design of data, by the drift monitoring, by the briefing document. Each of these articles has come to a conclusion: all of the machinery relies on the workforce, and the workforce is the one thing that practitioners have traditionally had the least control over. This conclusion is to the dependency itself: how Support Network fits into the implementation model the series has developed for you, the practitioners supporting participants and families, and those who are building teams around your plans.

Where the platform meets the model

Selection by your attributes.  The worker-fit article called for the inclusion of attributes in the plan; the attributes are a search in the platform. Support Network's workforce is searchable by behaviour support experience and behaviour support profiles are filtered by your search, temperament indicators, relevant history, communication style and then shortlisted, with meet and greet as the final tool. The influence structure this series recommended, your specification, made operational.

Stability as a purchasable property.  Consistency, the series' active ingredient, is partly a workforce-structure issue: teams with a few selected, sustained workers are less likely to “drift” than to rotate a large group of any workers that might have been available. This is exactly what independent arrangements allow: the participant maintains the workers, not the roster, and if providers use the platform to create a bench, then they have established the engagement standard: no worker, regardless of its source, supports the person without being briefed.

Briefability by design.  Each arrangement you arrange via the platform can start with your implementation briefing in the worker's hands before the first shift, and the small and stable team setup allows the training system, core-team scenario rehearsal, and senior-worker briefing of new workers to be scheduled, which is not often possible in wide rotating rosters.

The practitioner’s role in the connection

The boundaries are similar to Support Network's professional series. Practitioner sets and communicates; participant, family or provider selects; platform validates, links and dispenses, screening, credentials, agreements, clear rates (as per limits). What practitioners can legitimately add at the point of connection: the implementer-attributes paragraph as the search brief, and the briefing gate as a condition of the implementation plan, through which all workers who are engaged pass. What practitioners don't do is select the individual workers or agree to any selection system that involves the clinician: the plan says which instrument; the plan does not play the instrument.

How this plays out in practice

Set the scene for the engagement this series has been building over eight articles. A new plan is produced for a young man whose behaviours are an escape from demand, the plan includes the paragraph of implementer-attributes, low demand interactional style, high consistency, and ability to engage in his gaming. His mum searches Support Network against it, narrows the field down to four workers who have experience managing behaviour, and selects two according to meet-and-greets, his obvious comfort level with one of them considered data. Before the first shifts both pass the briefing gate on the two page implementation briefing, the core team of three repeat the rehearsal of the escalation map twice, and the tick-sheet is left on the kitchen clipboard, while the monthly graph is returned to the core team. The data demonstrates what six months of consistent implementation of the plan has demonstrated, and the practitioner's report has a sentence it's been working toward for all six months: the plan was implemented as written.

Next steps

Next plan, run the full stack once, set paragraph as plan, search platform against the plan, set briefing gate as engagement standard, graph back monthly. One engagement, end to end, and the model is no longer an article series, it's your practice.