Providers of mental-health services still rely on intervention techniques such as physical restraints and confinement to control some psychiatric hospital patients, a practice which can cause harm to both patients and care facilities, new research from the School of Public Health and Health Systems reveals.
“The latest findings show that almost one in four psychiatric patients in Ontario hospitals are restrained using control interventions, such as chairs that prevent rising, wrist restraints, seclusion rooms or acute control medications,” said Professor John Hirdes, senior author on the study and head of interRAI Canada, an international research network that develops mental-health assessment tools.
The study is just one of several projects led by Hirdes and SPHHS graduate students published in a special issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Healthcare Management Forum. The issue focuses on how interRAI assessment tools can be used to improve mental-health services for patients.
“interRAI assessments are improving the quality of services across the continuum of care by identifying the strengths, preferences and needs of vulnerable persons and by benchmarking the outcomes of care at the facility level.”
-John Hirdes, interRAI Canada
The special issue also reports that delays in transferring mental-health patients out of hospitals and into other care settings costs the government an average of $7,650 per patient, and Francophone Ontarians are one third as likely to have daily contact with psychiatrists at admission compared to English-speaking patients after controlling for a variety of other explanatory factors.
