Reducing and Eliminating Restrictive Practices: Hope Circle’s success
Reducing and Eliminating Restrictive Practices
SIL and in-home & community support providers have spent the past couple years focused on meeting the compliance and legislative burden around regulated restrictive practices – but not all are working on proactive strategies to reduce and eliminate them.
Over time, Hope Circle has been measuring our progress with reducing and eliminating restrictive practices for our clients and we’re proud to talk about our clients’ successes. This is all part of our work when implementing behaviour support plans.
NDIS Context for Restrictive Practices
Given the potential impact on vulnerable people, restrictive practices have been a key focal point for regulators under the NDIS since the scheme’s introduction.
More recently, the NDIS has had a priority to “reduce and eliminate restrictive practices” within its policy framework for behaviour support and restrictive practices. At Hope Circle, we support this goal to help NDIS participants to live the life they want with as few restrictions as possible.
At the Allied Health Professions Day run by the South Australian Restrictive Practices Unit on 14 October 2025, Senior Authorising Officer Trinh Mai said that – since the RPAS started (in 2022) – they have seen an overall reduction from an average 3.5 restrictive practices per approved behaviour support plan down to 3 now.
Whilst data isn’t readily available on this metric across the sector, this snapshot provided within South Australia is a good benchmark to measure against.
Hope Circle’s success reducing restrictive practices
Our success in reducing and eliminating restrictive practices has been enabled through our proactive approach working with clients and their circle of support.
Over the past 15 months, Hope Circle has supported a quarter of our clients with a behaviour support plan to have their restrictice practices completely eliminated. We are finding that clients have been empowered to live a better life, more in control of making their own decisions.
Across the balance of the other three quarters of clients, we have seen their restrictive practices reduce from 2.8 to 2.1 per client – which is about 30% less than the average across the sector.
Hope Circle’s approach to reducing restrictive practices
Since being established in 2019, Hope Circle has had a priority on working to support complex clients to move towards their positive future and live the life they want. One of our founding members is a behaviour support practitioner and the organization is committed to having this skillset on-staff to manage proactively.
We haven’t been working with these clients to reduce and eliminate their restrictive practices because of what the NDIS has said – we’ve been doing it because it’s part of our core purpose and mission.
Through 2025, our collaborative work with our clients and their circle of support has enabled more autonomy and less restriction for these clients.
We recognize that for myriad reasons, there are clients for whom it is not or not yet safe or practical to reduce their restrictive practices; and we work closely with the circle of supports to ensure these are appropriately managed.
We also work with these stakeholders and the authorizing body to ensure that – where there are restrictive practices required – these are the least restrictive strategies possible.
Client example
To understand this a bit better, let’s have a look at an example of a client we will call Danielle.
Danielle is a young woman living with multiple disabilities; and has had a history of engaging in self-harm when she felt anxious.
Hope Circle’s client care plan and risk plan documented the risks, strategies and reporting that was in place to support Danielle.
As part of her circle of support we worked with the behaviour support practitioner who developed strategies and was available to support Danielle over the phone at key times of anxiety.
Together, we provided access to sensory activities that helped with emotional regulation, and consistent staffing led to better rapport and trust which enabled Danielle to speak about how she was feeling at times.
Through education, Danielle developed an understanding of options that she could access without restrictive practices (like removing access to sharps). This meant she could take her own action like contacting mental health triage; and has been able to improve her emotional regulation in these times.
Having built trust with her support staff has meant that at times when Danielle felt like self-harming, she has told staff and they could remind her about other options available.
Reducing restrictive practices for Danielle has enabled her dignity of risk and given her the ability to make more of her own choices.
The outcome: removal of the restrictive practices has also enabled a reduction of support needed outside the home when Danielle is interacting with other people in the community. This has led to more chances to meet people, engage in community and live a better quality of life.
Hope Circle’s Secret to Reducing and Eliminating Restrictive Practices
Our secret to the success of reducing and eliminating client restrictive practices comes down to a number of elements including:
- All our staff are trained in behaviour support principles and further on client-specific plans by the behaviour support practitioner to implement regulated restrictive practices, where they are applied.
- We proactively work with the NDIS and state-based authorities to provide transparency and accountability over restrictive practices that are implemented.
- Meeting compliance and legislative requirements is just the first step. Hope Circle takes a proactive approach to work with a client and their circle of support* to implement the behaviour support plan, and then going above what is required and working on strategies to reduce the restrictive practices.
- We go above and beyond to try and explain the restrictive practices to the client and their parent/guardian. For example, we have provided clients with their own easy read or translated resources that explain specific restrictive practices.
- Regularly reviewing data from staff and incident reports which are monitored proactively. For example, where we see a reduction of incidents we will proactively discuss with the behaviour support practitioner to see if we can take steps toward reducing.
*Circle of support means working in partnership with the client’s behaviour support practitioner, support coordinator, family/guardian, mental health and therapists.
In addition, our staffing is setup in a way to back up our disability support workers with key capabilities to support clients with behaviour support plans, that is:
- Our Service Coordinator provides a point of contact, collaborating with the various stakeholders supporting the client.
- Further on-call 24/7 rostering and supervision support provides the disability support worker with a means to escalate when situations evolve out of hours.
- Our Compliance Officer – as a dedicated resource and prior experience as a behaviour support practitioner–brings specialist knowledge to complex issues and incidents, and strategies that can further minimize restrictive practices.
- As a registered nurse, our COO brings medical knowledge to issues and incidents around medication and chemical restraints.
Conclusion
At Hope Circle, it’s part of our core identity that we work to help our clients live the life they want to lead. We work to provide them with dignity of risk, hope for the future and increase the control they have over decisions.
Through working with clients and their circle of support to reduce or eliminate restrictive practices, we are fulfilling our vision to empower people with disability to live the life they want.
This has enabled us to achieve a 25% reduction in the number of restrictive practices over the past year, and for a quarter of clients who had them to have had them eliminated.
Want more?
Hope Circle is a registered NDIS provider specialising in providing SIL and in-home & community support to individuals with complex disabilities.
Our team has extensive experience working with NDIS participants who have corrections or forensic histories, mental health and physical disabilities.
For more information regarding our services in Adelaide or Perth, please contact us here.