What Changes When Your Occupational Therapist and Behaviour Support Practitioner Work Together

Why does it matter? Because when these two disciplines work together in unison, the support your family member receives becomes more consistent, more targeted, and more effective where it counts: at home, at school, in the community, and in daily life.

The Occupational Therapist Perspective

An OT who works with your family member isn't just ticking boxes on a form. They first complete a detailed evaluation to understand how someone functions in their daily life. It’s called a Functional Capacity Assessment, depicting a comprehensive picture of the person: their routines, their environment, where things tend to go smoothly, and where they tend to break down. All this information is directly relevant to behaviour.

Think about the morning routine. An OT observing a child or adult moving through their morning isn't just looking at whether they can dress themselves. They're noticing where demands spike, where a transition is too sudden, where sensory input becomes too high. Even where certain tasks require more concentration than is practically available at that hour of the day. These are often the moments when distress builds, and behaviour escalates.

With appropriate consent and information-sharing arrangements in place, a behaviour support practitioner can access this level of detail: which part of the morning is hardest, what the environment looks and sounds like, what skills are available versus which ones collapse under pressure. The practitioner can use the data to build strategies that address a specific situation, not to generalise.

How does this influence real-life practice? Instead of a plan with responses to difficult behaviour after it happens, you get a plan designed to change the conditions that make difficult behaviour likely in the first place.

OT & PBS Strategies That Reinforce Each Other

One of the most valuable benefits of Occupational Therapy and Positive Behaviour Support working together is that strategies stop competing with each other; instead, they mutually reinforce.

An OT might recommend visual schedules to help with sequencing and reduce anxiety around transitions. A behaviour support plan addressing distress during the same transitions benefits from a common tool. When both practitioners become aware of the trigger and proposed strategy, both reports reference it, and everyone supporting your family member is using it consistently. If they don't know what the other has recommended, you end up with two separate solutions that feel different depending on who's in the room, and neither gets the chance to take hold.

The same applies to environmental adjustments or to the way demands are introduced and sequenced through the day. When these are aligned across OT and behaviour support and communicated clearly to the support workers, teachers, and family members delivering them, your family member experiences consistency wherever they are. Consistency is deeply settling for people who find unpredictability extremely challenging.

As a family, you shouldn't have to be the one making these connections. But knowing that this integration is possible, and asking whether it's happening, is one of the most useful things you can do when you're building your support team.

How OT and PBS Collaboration Reduces Stress at Home

When OT and behaviour support work together, something shifts in the home environment.

The proposed strategies are clearer. You’re not presented with two separate sets of instructions from two separate reports, but a coherent approach that everyone can follow. From support workers, teachers, grandparents, to siblings, they contribute to a less stressful experience for the person you’re supporting. The challenging behaviour making daily life so hard is now reduced.

For families, this means even less guesswork and exhaustion trying to translate professional recommendations into something practical. People express a sense of relief in these circumstances that there is a coordinated team around them.

It Starts With the Right Conversation

If your family member currently has OT support or is being assessed, it's worth asking whether that information is being shared with their behaviour support practitioner. If they don't yet have behaviour support in place, understand how it could help, particularly if daily routines are a consistent source of difficulty.

You don't need to have all the answers before you reach out. That's what the first conversation is for.

Sigma Therapies OT and behaviour support teams work from shared clinical information, with appropriate consent, which means assessments inform plans and the strategies your family receives are built to work together. We support children, adolescents, and adults across Perth and regional WA.

If you'd like to talk about what support might look like for your family, we'd love to hear from you.