Mental health hospitals subjected up to 100 people to face-down restraint last October, NHS data shows.
The figure reveals that the practice is still widespread, despite the UK Government issuing guidance in 2014 with the intention of phasing it out.
The guidance described face-down restraint as an “outdated practice”.
Mark Neary, right, believes NHS statistics under-represent face-down restraint. On the left is his son, Steven, who experienced the practice
It said hospitals can use it for too long, often not as a last resort, and “even to inflict pain, humiliate or punish”.
Mark Neary is a co-founder of Rightful Lives, an online exhibition exploring the human rights of people with autism and learning disabilities.
Figures ‘under-represent’ face-down restraint
He believes the NHS figures under-represent the extent to which mental health hospitals use face-down restraint.
Neary, a counsellor, said his autistic son Steven, 28, was subjected to face-down restraint when held in a positive behaviour unit for almost a year from December 2009.
He said “every family” involved in Rightful Lives, which has 983 members on its Facebook page, can tell “at least one prone restraint story”.
‘How powerless is that feeling?’
Neary, 59, from Cowley in London, said: “You’re face down on the floor. You can’t see anything. You just know that you’ve got people holding you down. How powerless is that feeling?”
The 2014 guidance was prompted by revelations of abuse three years earlier at the private Bristol hospital Winterbourne View.
The restraint figures appear in regular information that the government publishes. The intention is to provide an update on efforts to move people from hospitals into the community.
The mental health statistics also show that of the 3,575 people with learning disabilities or autism in hospitals, 275 were subjected to another form of physical restraint.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said any restraint should be a “last resort”.
The Care Quality Commission is carrying out an “in-depth review” into “seclusion, segregation and restraint”.
Related:
- Huge surge in hospitals using restraint
- Lamb distressed at face-down restraint
- Transforming Care programme ‘failed’
- Safeguards over care ‘falling over’
- Commissioner to investigate secure units
Published: 25 January 2019
