Introduction to The SENAD Group

The SENAD Group have been working with NAPPI for 3 years. They were awarded NAPPI Centre of Excellence status in 2015. To learn more about the SENAD Group and their relationship with NAPPI UK please read their case study.

The SENAD Group provide locally based specialist education, therapy and care for the most complex, vulnerable and hard to place young people and adults. Our services work with people with autism, mild to severe learning difficulties, mental health needs and challenging behaviour and are shaped to meet the changing needs of people as they move from childhood to adulthood and beyond. We have five specialist schools, three transition homes for young adults and four residential homes for adults requiring ongoing high level support. We also have a community support service.

We spoke to Martin Bradder, Group Health, Safety and Wellbeing Manager:

Why did you choose NAPPI uk?

‘We were looking to move away from a physical approach to a positive behaviour management approach across all the services of the group and had seen great results at one of our sites in Herefordshire that had introduced NAPPI first. We found that whilst some systems stated that Physical Intervention was the last resort, it was fairly obvious that the Psychological approach taken by NAPPI was the driving philosophy. NAPPI Physical Interventions are less intrusive than systems we have used in the past, and above all consider the safety of the staff and service users.’

‘The different levels of training and the defined modules of NAPPI allow us to adapt training to meet the needs of the individuals on each site and compliments our person centred approach. For example we have recently introduced the autism awareness module as a supplementary training module to induction training for our Adult Homes staff, this has received excellent feedback. It is planned to roll this out to all services.’

What was your identified training need?

‘Most of the children and young people and adults using our service display some form of challenging behaviour. We were however looking to get away from the physical approach and adopt a more person centred and psychological approach. The training should place at the centre of its approach the safety, dignity and diversity of our service users. Most sites had different behaviour management procedures and we wanted a consistency of approach across the Group. With NAPPI the modules are well defined by content which recognises the different learning styles of our staff.’

What difference has NAPPI made?

‘It is difficult to quantify if NAPPI has been solely responsible for reductions in incident rates, but we have seen significant reductions in reportable incidents and ‘time lost costs’ due to staff injury at the majority of the sites where NAPPI is fully embedded. Our onsite trainers are able to provide ongoing support to staff. We actively encourage Trainers to deliver bite sized learning to small groups of staff who may be based around a particular student, or refresh the staff knowledge of individual training NAPPI training modules. This has helped to embed NAPPI into many aspects of the care we deliver. By refocusing a service user from a high level of anxiety to a position where they feel more at ease with their world quickly by using NAPPI techniques and philosophy reduces not only the service user’s anxiety but also the anxiety of other service users and the staff supporting them.’