Study explores restraint and sedation of people with dementia in hospitals

A study has been published by the NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research) exploring the use of restrictive practices in the everyday care of people living with dementia in English hospitals.

Researchers from the University of West London analysed 225 days of ethnographic observation across nine NHS wards in England alongside more than 1,000 interviews with healthcare professionals. They found that restrictive practices such as bedside rails being raised, doors and pathways blocked by furniture, verbal commands to sit down or go back to bed, and physical interventions such as non-consensual sedation were an ‘embedded aspect of routine ward care’.

Prof Andy Northcott, Professor of Medical Sociology at the University of West London and lead author of the study, says:

“This study is the first observation of its kind that looks at the experience of people living with dementia through a hospital admission, and how they are contained at the bedside throughout it.

Once a person with dementia is admitted for anything, they’re essentially expected to stay in bed and there’s a series of subtle to quite overt restrictive practices that are used to ensure that the hospital can manage around them. These practices are largely done to be in the patient’s best interest but they have a huge impact on the person they’re done to. The immediate negative impact is that they might not necessarily know where they are, and have the expectation to sit still. Staff don’t like the restriction, they just feel that’s the only way they can manage a person living with dementia, because they feel liable if that person was to have a fall.”

Read the study here: https://www.journalslibrary.nihr.ac.uk/hsdr/GJKF0714