RESEARCH ARTICLE
Mental Health Nursing, Mechanical Restraint Measures and Patients’ Legal Rights
Soren Birkeland1, 2, *, Frederik A. Gildberg1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2016Volume: 10
First Page: 8
Last Page: 14
Publisher ID: TONURSJ-10-8
DOI: 10.2174/1874434601610010008
Article History:
Received Date: 20/03/2015Revision Received Date: 02/06/2015
Acceptance Date: 15/06/2015
Electronic publication date: 28/03/2016
Collection year: 2016
open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International Public License (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode), which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
Coercive mechanical restraint (MR) in psychiatry constitutes the perhaps most extensive exception from the common health law requirement for involving patients in health care decisions and achieving their informed consent prior to treatment. Coercive measures and particularly MR seriously collide with patient autonomy principles, pose a particular challenge to psychiatric patients’ legal rights, and put intensified demands on health professional performance. Legal rights principles require rationale for coercive measure use be thoroughly considered and rigorously documented. This article presents an in-principle Danish Psychiatric Complaint Board decision concerning MR use initiated by untrained staff. The case illustrates that, judicially, weight must be put on the patient perspective on course of happenings and especially when health professional documentation is scant, patients’ rights call for taking notice of patient evaluations. Consequently, if it comes out that psychiatric staff failed to pay appropriate consideration for the patient’s mental state, perspective, and expressions, patient response deviations are to be judicially interpreted in this light potentially rendering MR use illegitimated. While specification of law criteria might possibly improve law use and promote patients’ rights, education of psychiatry professionals must address the need for, as far as possible, paying due regard to meeting patient perspectives and participation principles as well as formal law and documentation requirements.
