Positive and safe care – restrictive interventions

Lead: Stephen Davison
Email: tewv.positiveandsafe@nhs.net

Overview

At times, we can all display behaviours that challenge. Needing support from mental health and learning disability services can be difficult and can create situations where these are more likely to occur.

We want to stop these situations from developing where possible. This is called positive and safe care.

We encourage and support our staff and services to use approaches like ‘Safewards’ and ‘Positive behaviour support’ to do this:

Safewards

Creating a positive, engaging ward environment that considers the needs of people coming into hospital and how we can support them in the right way during a difficult time.

Positive behaviour support

The framework we use to understand why behaviours occur and how can we best support individuals to prevent them in the future.

Restrictive interventions

On very rare occasions our preventative approaches may not be enough to support somebody. To keep people safe, staff may need to use a restrictive intervention. This should always be a very last resort.

Restrictive interventions are clinical interventions that restrict or limit what you can do or where you can go. These include:

• Physical restraint
  The use of approved techniques to restrict your movement
• Rapid tranquilisation (also known as chemical restraint)
  Being given medication that may help stop the behaviour.
• Mechanical restraint
  Using a strong material strap or cuff to prevent or restrict your body from moving.
• Seclusion
  Providing you with an isolated safe space where you can stay until the behaviour has stopped.

Following any use of restrictive intervention we will discuss the incident with you. This is called a post incident review. We will discuss what we can learn from the incident and how we can stop similar situations from happening again.

Find out more…

Reading about these interventions can be really difficult. That’s why we’ve broken this information down into single topics which you can read through at your own pace in the document below:

L1096, V1, 10/06/2020 (Archive: 10/06/2023)