Sometimes people with disability can do things that are unintentional.

When behaviour is unintentional, it doesn’t have a purpose.

If a person with disability does something unintentional, they might hurt:

• themselves
• the people around them.

Unintentional behaviours are very rare.

Our policy doesn’t cover unintentional behaviours.

A professional needs to do an assessment.

An assessment is a way to find out more about someone’s behaviour.

They do this assessment to work out if a person’s behaviour doesn’t have a purpose.

The professional needs to have the right skills to do this.

You can find out more about unintentional behaviours by signing up to one of our information sessions.

We will tell you about practices that our policy doesn’t cover.

We explain more about this in the Training and information sessions section.

You can find out more about unintentional behaviours on our website.

On our website, when we talk about ‘non‑intentional risk behaviour’ we mean unintentional behaviour.

www.wa.gov.au/government/document-collections/authorisation-of-restrictive- practices-resources

In this bulletin, we talk about 3 types of unintentional behaviour.

Some disabilities affect:

• a person’s brain
• how they move their body.

It can cause them to move:

• in unsafe ways
• without meaning to.

This behaviour might put them at risk of hurting:

• themselves
• the people around them.

For example, they might:

• hit another person

• hit something around them, like a wall.

• fall over.

Some people with disability need support with daily activities.

For example, to brush their teeth.

Some people might react a little bit when someone supports them.

Just reacting a little bit could be an example of unintentional behaviour.

But we say it’s not unintentional behaviour if someone:

• reacts a lot
• tries to avoid getting the support.

This is because the person is showing that something is not right.

People must do more assessments to understand why a person is reacting this way.

A person with disability might do something that is:

• unsafe
• unintentional.

This can happen because:

• the environment is unsafe
• they don’t know that what they are doing is unsafe.

For example, they might:

• touch a hot stove

• walk towards a busy road.