The PBS Festival’s second year success!

The second PBS Festival, a biannual open-air event showcasing the best in positive behaviour support approaches, has once again been an inspiring success.

The festival is unique and boasts 4 ‘stages’ for thinking, a ‘think hut’, conversation street, ‘Talking Tent’ and a ‘Skills Tent’ in addition to activities to enjoy the great outdoors, with a Gnome hunt, Archery, Tai Chi and demonstrations on how Virtual Reality and Green Screens can aid support methods.

For a second year, The PBS festival aimed to help professionals in this sector to think differently, in a very different space. Sometimes people need a change of scenery, a change to the senses and a creative space to try and work through some big questions such as; how do we enable change? How do we design safe quality services? How do we improve quality of life? How do we work together? How do we embed change in practice? The festival experience encourages people to enjoy beautiful natural venues, great food, new people, new experiences combined with expert academics and professionals to guide you through an opportunity to think about these big questions in PBS and social care and take action.

People supported from various providers, commissioners, practitioners, support workers all attended alongside a number of faces from Dimensions.

We’re delighted that Dimensions took home six of the awards up for grabs! We’d like to extend a huge congratulations to all of our inspiring winners:

1. Holly Thoms who won the ‘Practice Leadership’ award. (South region)
2. Jo Saunders and Sally Amaira who won the ‘Extra mile’ award. (South region)
3. Lisa Morgan who won the ‘PBS Practitioner’ award. (Wales)
4. Neil Murdoch who won the ‘Person Centred’ award. (West region)
5. The Support Team from Peacehaven under Shona Chamberlain’s locality who won the ‘Skill Development’ award. (South region)
6. The Support Team from Gilbert Place under Becky Dunham’s locality, who won the ‘Active Support’ award. (West region)

“I am very proud to see so many of our colleagues being recognised for putting the technology and values of PBS into practice.  For over a decade, Dimensions has been using PBS to improve lives – initially, through the work of the Behaviour Support Team, and then through Activate, a model of setting-wide PBS which allows us to reach everyone we support.   Now we have colleagues winning awards across of range of PBS categories.  When it comes to Positive Behavioural Support, Dimensions goes from strength to strength”. – Nick Barratt, Dimensions Head of Positive Behaviour Support

To help include the people we support in the event, Dimensions also organised a cushion making competition. We dis played eight entries from people we support at the event, allowing people to cast their votes on their favourites.

Each cushion was so greatly appreciated and each design was truly personal.

We’re still in the process of collating the votes but we’re excited to announce the winning submission this week!

The festival is funded by a network of providers including, Dimensions, Active Prospects, CMG, Avenues, Blue Ribbon, Pathway for Care and PBS4 along with special education needs ‘[The] Loddon School’ and the leadership organisation for education, training and workforce development,  Health Education England.

If you would like to find out more, or are interested in how you can get involved with The PBS festival email Marketing@dimensions-uk.org