OBJECTIVE To investigate the facilities for inpatient care of mentally disordered people in prison. DESIGN Semistructured inspections conducted by doctor and nurse. Expected standards were based on healthcare quality standards published by the Prison Service or the NHS. SETTING 13 prisons with inpatient beds in England and Wales subject to the prison inspectorate's routine inspection progra...

Violence towards health-care workers, especially in areas such as mental health/psychiatry, has become increasingly common, with nursing staff suggesting that a fear of violence from their patients may affect the quality of care they provide. Structured clinical tools have the potential to assist health-care providers in identifying patients who have the potential to become violent or aggressiv...

OBJECTIVES The objective of this study is to characterize patients admitted to a mental health Adolescent Male Treatment Unit (AMTU) over an 18-month interval. METHODS The study is a cross-sectional retrospective chart review. Data concerning medication management was abstracted along with age, psychiatric diagnoses, degree of impairment, length-of-stay (LOS), and episodes of locked seclusion...

The Colorado Court of Appeals reversed the action of a lower court, which dismissed a claim by the plaintiff, a student training to be a medical assistant, that his school's unauthorized testing of his blood for HIV had resulted in an intrusion upon seclusion under state law. The student had earlier confided information concerning his HIV status to an instructor, asking that the information rem...

Restraint and seclusion (R/S) have been used in many countries and across service sectors for centuries. With the recent and increasing recognition of the harm associated with these procedures, efforts have been made to reduce and prevent R/S. Following a scathing media exposé in 1998 and congressional scrutiny, the United States began a national effort to reduce and prevent R/S use. With feder...

A task force authorized by the Executive Council of the Association for Behavior Analysis International (ABAI) generated the statement below concerning the techniques called restraint and seclusion. Members of the task force independently reviewed the scientific literature concerning restraint and seclusion and agreed unanimously to the content of the statement. The Executive Council accepted t...