Active Support – Philosophy of Care at Expanding Horizons

At Expanding Horizons, we believe a person’s quality of life depends on their engagement in meaningful activities and relationships and we firmly believe that in order to increase a person’s participation, support should enable them to succeed at what they are doing.

Support needs to be individually tailored and responsive to changing circumstances to engage the person in every aspect of day-to-day life. If too little support is given the person will fail; too much and the member of staff will be doing the task or those parts of it that the person could do themselves.

Support that isn’t correctly matched to the person’s circumstances may also be obstructing relationships with others.

When effective support is not in place, people experience long periods of inactivity and repeated failure. If people feel that they fail when they try new things, they will be less likely to try them again.

Refusing opportunities for participation can easily become a person’s favoured option because without the right level and type of support only refusal stops their repeated experience of failure and reduces their anxieties about unfamiliar activities or situations.

Active Support gives us tools and ways of working to bridge the gap between what people could do themselves and what is needed for successful engagement.

There are four elements, or principles of Active Support that can be applied to any activity or interaction to help those who are providing support to work out what they should do:

 

• Every moment has potential - viewing everything that happens at home and in the community (however mundane) as an opportunity for people to participate, including the things we all need to do as part of our home life or work responsibilities; activities we enjoy or aspire to at home and in the community and conversations/ interactions with all the people around us.

 

• Little and often – recognising that everything that happens throughout the day is made up of smaller parts or steps and supporting people to engage in parts of each opportunity with slow, relaxed, frequent and obvious support.

 

• Graded assistance – As each activity unfolds, adjusting the amount of help provided to fit the particular task or step. This allows the person to try things out, get used to them, gradually do more for themselves and make more decisions about what to do next.

 

• Maximising choice and control – seeking opportunities for people to make more choices and take more control of when and how they will be engaged

 

Successful support for engagement is built on the foundations of familiar routines and effective communication. Being able to predict what is likely to come next and linking the introduction of new activities and experiences to existing routines and rituals, stops things ‘coming out of the blue’ and increases the likelihood of success.

We are often too focused on verbal communication and don’t appreciate the wealth of non-verbal information people are actually responding to. For example, the first level of help which staff should be aware of is simple presentation of the materials – making the situation speak for itself.