Mr Andy Chia, Ms Jessica Gormley1, Ms Natalie Wilson1, Mr Hugh Nehrybecki1
1Problematic Behaviour Support Services, Richmond, Australia
Biography:
Andy Chia is General Manager of PBSS, leading the organisation alongside Executive Director Jessica Gormley, providing clinical and strategic leadership across its forensic and clinical services teams. A Clinical Psychologist with more than 25 years’ experience, Andy has worked across public mental health, child and adolescent services, assertive outreach, and Victorian forensic systems. His expertise includes psychosis, personality disorder, atypical offending, complex risk, and high-needs presentations. Formerly a senior clinician within Forensic Intervention Services’ High Risk and Complex Needs team, Andy brings systems-informed, psychodynamic, Gestalt, and evidence-based approaches to practice, supervision, workforce development, and accessible care for complex marginalised clients.
Abstract:
Uncertainty is inherent in forensic practice. Clinicians must make decisions about future harm, treatment readiness and restrictive intervention without complete information or guaranteed outcomes.
When services respond defensively to that uncertainty, responsibility can fragment: one service addresses trauma, another behaviour, another substance use, while justice agencies manage risk. Each response may be reasonable in isolation, yet the overall pathway can become discontinuous, with repeated referral, duplicated assessment and no shared formulation guiding risk reduction.
This presentation examines how organisational discomfort with uncertainty can contribute to defensive practice. Risk may be transferred through narrower service boundaries, increased monitoring or onward referral rather than reduced through coordinated intervention. The problem is not that services establish limits. It is that uncertainty can become dispersed across systems without clear clinical ownership.
The Forensic Behaviour Support model proposes a structured response. A single formulation links behavioural function, offence pathways, responsivity barriers and future-harm scenarios.
A lead practitioner maintains continuity across disciplines, while review processes make assumptions, limitations and decision thresholds explicit. Progress is judged against both community safety and the effects of intervention on autonomy, restriction and participation. The aim is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to manage it transparently and collectively.
Forensic responsibility means remaining engaged long enough to test hypotheses, adapt intervention and determine whether risk is genuinely changing, rather than assuming that transferring care has also reduced the risk.