Targeted Environmental Therapy
At Husly, a 24-hour residential and care facility, our clinical practice is grounded in the principles of targeted environmental therapy.
Our Mission
Husly’s primary goal is to create conditions that foster safety, learning, and personal development. Through our expertise, experience, and professional tools within environmental therapy, we provide individually tailored frameworks that meet the needs of each resident.
Our work is guided by a structured therapeutic approach focusing on user participation, empowerment through meaningful activities (education, work, and leisure), collaboration with private and public networks, professional development, and continuous evaluation of our organization and methods. These measures are essential to achieving our mission.
Targeted Environmental Therapy
Targeted environmental therapy is a professional model consisting of methods, therapeutic interventions, and professional attitudes, implemented in structured and goal-directed processes. To work effectively within this framework, three key components must be present:
- Professional competence
- Values and attitudes
- The ability to collaborate
At Husly, we emphasize the importance of appropriate competence and approaches, always adapted to the individual resident and in collaboration with specialized health services.
Cultural Sensitivity
An essential part of our approach is openness and curiosity towards each resident’s unique life experiences and individuality, alongside general cultural competence and awareness of variations within societies. Research shows that in human encounters, a culturally sensitive attitude is more important than factual knowledge about a person’s specific background.
For this reason, we also aim to recruit staff with refugee or first-generation immigrant backgrounds, not only to strengthen cultural competence but also to serve as role models in a social learning perspective.
User Involvement
Real user participation requires that professionals and systems are aware of their own power position and prioritize empowerment of residents. This means enabling individuals to gain greater influence and decision-making power in their own lives, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to live as meaningful and independent a life as possible, despite illness or functional challenges.
Family and Relatives
Collaboration with family and relatives must always be based on the resident’s wishes and consent, while ensuring strict confidentiality in accordance with health legislation.
The Norwegian Directorate of Health published national guidelines for involving relatives in 2017 [1], which serve as an important reference for our work at Husly. Families often hold valuable knowledge about the resident, and involving them appropriately strengthens the service provided both for the resident and for their relatives. This may include connecting residents to both established and new support networks.
Preventing Violence and Threats
At Husly, safety is a priority. Based on thorough assessment and risk analysis, we develop procedures that ensure appropriate safeguarding of each resident. We have extensive experience in managing challenging behavior such as aggression, self-harm, or absconding, always with professional and responsible handling.
Understanding Suicidality
Knowledge about suicide is critical in institutional care. Suicide, suicidal behavior, and self-harm can also be seen as forms of communication that must be understood in a social and relational context.
Such actions gain meaning through how others perceive and interpret them, but these interpretations may not always reflect the individual’s true motives or experiences. Each resident must therefore be understood as an active agent in a changing context. This is particularly relevant for individuals who have experienced significant life changes or are living with great unpredictability.
Suicidal thoughts, expressions, self-harming behavior, suicide attempts, and suicide itself can all be seen as different manifestations of existential, social, psychological, or physical distress.
[1] National Guidelines for Involvement of Relatives, Norwegian Directorate of Health (2017)