The BSP Implementation Briefing: What Support Teams Need From You

This series has repeatedly pointed to a document that few behaviour support engagements ever write, but which gets written for the person implementing the plan: the strategy summary, a one-page document handed to the people who face the behaviour. It cannot do this job and was never designed to: the full behaviour support plan is written for the commission, the funder, the provider and other clinicians; it's at a length and mode no shift can hold. A request from the support workers to implement from the full document is a bit like handing a flight crew the aircraft's certification file, and most of the drift that this series has discussed starts there: between the document that exists and the document that the team needs. That is the document to which this article refers.

The implementation briefing, section by section

First, the person, then the behaviours.  Tell two or three sentences on the subject of who they are, what they like, what a good day looks like, how they communicate. Teams treat people the way the first paragraph treats them, and a briefing which begins with an incident history has created the shift it briefs.

The working why.  When she does X, it's typically related to Y, one sentence per target behaviour. The why is the key to turning procedures into judgements, and 1 sentence per behaviour is the working depth as stated in the training article.

The green strategies, what we do every day.  Escalations that are thwarted by proactive strategies are out of view for everybody else, the core of the plan, environment, routine, communication approach, skill-building, choice points, all in the form of everyday practice, not clinical categories, are the ones that drift first.

The escalation map.  Language: early warning signs, at each point: what to do, what to say and not say, what never to do, each never with its one line reason. This part is practised in the scenario training and is the reference the 2am shift turns to.

Data, in the collectable format.  The three measures as well as the definitions a stranger could score, the tick-sheet, as per the data article, embedded here so that recording is part of the plan and not surrounding paperwork.

Restrictive practice awareness, and any authorised practices.  The half page from the previous article, plus exactly what, exactly when, exactly how recorded and the reduction intent stated, if practices are authorised.

The lines.  Who to contact for what: the practitioner's channel and what is warranted, the report-it-today rule, and the standing invitation to surface issues of strategy friction, which this series has had from the beginning as intelligence, not complaint.

The disciplines that keep it working

The document serves a certain purpose, which is maintained by three rules. It is written by or approved by the practitioner: Always, a summary that comes from a well-meaning team leader floats, it is a translation, clinical work, billable as implementation support. This is version dated and gated, and every change to this briefing changes the core team's briefing. And it remains one or two pages, ruthlessly: every addition is priced with the likelihood of being read, and the complete plan is accessible for the depth intentionally saved by the summary.

How this plays out in practice

Imagine the difference in the same worker week, in two different versions of the very same engagement. In the first, on night one, she is given the forty page plan, reads six pages, and pieces her practice together from fragments of handover and instinct: the folk plan, day one. In the second, she reads the two page briefing before her first shift, gated, 15 minutes: she meets the person before behaviours, knows the working why, holds the green strategies, records on the tick-sheet and knows what goes up the line and to whom. In week two an escalation comes along and she does what the map says, what the last shift did, and what this series has said from its first article: the whole mechanism. There were no changes in the plan between versions. Its transmission did.

Next steps

This fortnight write the implementation briefing for one current plan, using the seven sections, and place it through the gate! Next, take one measurement: could each person who supports this participant this month have a two-minute conversation about what's in it?