When hostel supported-living staff face aggressive and violent behaviour from service users with chaotic lifestyles, generic training isn’t enough. Here’s how a tailored programme — built around stress, SCARF triggers, and real operational environments — transformed safety for one drug and alcohol support team.
The Challenge
A team of hostel supported-living staff were experiencing a variety of aggressive — and sometimes violent — behaviour from service users with chaotic lifestyles. The service manager had engaged physical intervention training years earlier, but the staff needed something far more relevant to their daily reality.
Team members reported feeling stressed, fearful, and sometimes angry over the incidents occurring as they worked with their client group out in the community — often in stressful or isolated situations. They needed training that met them where they actually worked, not a generic syllabus delivered in a classroom.
Key Issues Identified
Through consultation with staff and managers, four critical challenges emerged:
- Conflict often erupted due to a ‘Status Threat’ perceived by individuals — a social trigger that needed to be understood, not just managed.
- A lack of boundaries and inconsistency on rules between shifts was creating unpredictable environments.
- The office layout, where many high-stress interactions took place, was far from optimal — confined spaces with no easy exit routes.
- Staff were operating under an old policy that declared the service a ‘no restraint’ service, despite evidence and incidents pointing to the occasional high-risk need for physical intervention.
Staff were under direction from an old policy that the service is a ‘no restraint’ service — despite evidence and incidents pointing to the occasional high-risk need for physical intervention.
Our Approach
Dynamis delivered a three-part programme, each element designed to address the specific operational realities of the team:
- Understanding conflict through a stress-based model. Staff were introduced to the Curve model and SCARF domains — a framework that helped them identify the driving forces behind the difficult behaviours they were seeing. The SCARF domains proved particularly valuable in making sense of previously inexplicable client reactions.
- Natural body-language positioning for confined spaces. Many interactions happened in offices and bedrooms — spaces that don’t allow for traditional positioning strategies. Staff learned to use natural body language and movement to increase safety without escalating tension.
- Protective motions based on natural reflexes. Staff were trained to survive and escape from common assaults, ranging from serious to less serious types. These techniques were built on the body’s own reflexive responses to close danger — rapid, instinctive, and defensible.
The Outcomes
The emphasis on stress-related behaviours as a foundation for the training helped staff understand both their clients’ reactions and their own. This dual awareness — of what drives aggressive behaviour and what triggers their own fear or anger — created a more resilient team.
We also conducted a specific analysis of the physical environment and operational procedures for the service, matching the training outcomes directly to these realities. Staff described this as a refreshing change from the previous training company’s “cookie-cutter” method.
✅ What made the difference: Personal-protection and escorting procedures refined through years of work in sensitive environments — designed to offer maximum flexibility to staff while remaining robust in operational use and readily defensible in any legal proceedings that follow an incident.