Daryl’s previous role within the Northern Territory Department of Health provided specialist behavioural consultation and management to people with complex disabilities and challenging behaviour in a region of around 1 million square kilometres.  Daryl and his team also provided targeted services to clients living in the “Tristate” region that borders WA / NT and SA.

The interesting career path with behavioural services that Daryl has travelled commenced in 1988.  This further developed through his involvement with Gary LaVigna and Tom Willis’ Institute of Applied Behaviour Analysis (IABA) Los Angeles, California and was invited to attend the first Australian Institute on Assessment and Analysis of Severe and Challenging Behaviour in 1993, which has influenced the models of service delivery and approach that have shown to be both meaningful to clients and families, and, successful in positive results.

He has been the driving force behind providing advice in the development, implementation and management of behaviour, through the creation of strategies and individualised support solutions for clients, families and carers, and the provision of training to allied health and corrections workers.  Training offered, and his work and support to individuals and their families, is strongly underpinned by IABA principles and practices.

Working with clients who have experienced extended systematic failures in institutionalized care, Daryl has successfully worked with individuals, families and communities (many of which are remote communities) and re-created opportunities for people to be supported in their homeland communities.

Daryl also has extensive experience in developing programs for people for whom English is a second language (the Central Australian Region encompasses approximately 500 language groups).  He is a strong advocate of the ‘zero evacuation’ model of support, whereby a person is supported within the context of their life rather than taken away from the family and home environment in order to ‘treat’ the behaviour.

Daryl’s training workshop  ‘Effective Management of Aggressive Patients’ was included in the Centre for Remote Health, a joint centre of Flinders University and Charles Darwin University, Remote Nursing Practice curriculum from 2003 until his retirement from Department of health in 2009 . He has also been providing his services to the Northern Territory Supreme Court since 2003 as an expert witness and is the author of numerous custodial and non-custodial supervision orders for people with disabilities who have come in contact with the criminal justice system and found not mentally competent by the Court to plead. Daryl’s forensic work has resulted in major philosophical and attitudinal shifts within the Northern Territory Justice and Correctional Services relating to the care and management of these complex and extremely marginalised clients.