Strategies for Handling Challenging Behaviors in Healthcare Settings

This report explores proactive and reactive strategies employed in healthcare settings to manage challenging behaviors. Proactive strategies, involving multidisciplinary teams, are designed to prevent challenging behaviors, while reactive strategies address behaviors after they occur. The report categorizes challenging behaviors into self-injury, physical aggression, and verbal aggression, and emphasizes the importance of effective intervention processes. It highlights the significance of legislation, including the Health and Safety Act of 1974, the Mental Capacity Act of 2005, and common law, in guiding healthcare professionals. The document emphasizes the need for ethical practices and minimum restrictive interventions to improve patient behavior and ensure a safe environment. The report concludes that healthcare professionals must handle patient behaviors effectively and use intervention tools to promote positive behaviors. The provided analysis aims to assist students by providing a comprehensive overview of the topic.

PROMOTE POSITIVE BEHAVIOUR
Legislation in relation to restrictive
interventions
Restrictive interventions highlight the involvement of service professionals in life of
patients. Various laws are there relevant with restrictive interventions which are as
follows:
 Health and safety act, 1974: This law is developing to ensure the safety of
patient. Safe and healthy work environment is offer to employees so they can
perform their assign roles and responsibilities in an effective manner (Crone,
Hawken and Horner, 2015) . Required information and adequate training is
offer to staff members so they can deal with clients in adequate manner and
all intervention can be carried out in an ethical way.
 Mental capacity act, 2005: Patients who suffer with mental illness are
unable to take their own actions and decisions. They need help of service
professional in perform their basic functions. Main reason behind
development of this act is to protect the interest of these kind of individuals.
 Common law: This law indicates the duty of care provided to service users.
In this services providers set the safety and health grounds.
In health care homes use ideal process of intervention is very necessary as this help in
manage the situation in desired way. Firstly, patient exhibit behaviour that is to be
handle and manage by everyone after that aggressive behaviour may depict by client
in terms of scratching, biting and kicking that is required to be intervened
immediately by service professional so that situation can be. This process should be
followed by service providers and minimum or least restrictive practices should be
adopted in order to improve behaviour of patients. Legislations define the standard of
health and safety to be followed by service professional and allow minimum force at
time to deal with patients.
Proactive strategies: These strategies are the action plans use
to remove the possibilities of occurring challenging behaviour.
These are considered by service providers at time of plan and
review the activities for enhance behaviour of individual.
Under this, multi-disciplinary teams are required to cater the
overall needs of an individual.
Reactive Strategies: These are the strategies that are use after
outburst of challenging behaviour by patients.
Under this, no planning and reviewing is required. Actions
plans and theories are used to mitigate the conditions.
No multi-disciplinary teams are required in this. Situations and
action plans are handled by themselves only.
Difference between proactive and
reactive strategies
Mainly challenging behaviour is categorised into three categories which can be
understood by following points:
 Self-injury: It is defining as most devastating behaviour that an individual
show. Rubbing, scratching and head banging are the main kind of self-
injury behaviour.
 Physical aggression: This is defining an attempt in which an individual
harm other physically. It also stated as harming personal holdings of an
individual. A person is unable to control his/her behaviour (Robinson and
et. al., 2015). Aggression of this type can be determined by kicking hitting
and pushing.
 Verbal aggression: This kind of aggressive behaviour shown by the
service user. It is one of the most devastating form of communication.
Appearance attacks and character are the main example of this verbal
aggression.
Types of challenging behavior
From the given information, it can be concluded that for fulfil the requirements of
patients and clients of health care homes their behaviour should be handled by
professionals in an effective manner. Number of intervention tools are there that
can be use by service professionals to promote positive behaviour at workplace
and to develop better strategies.
CONCLUSION