Ok, so now you know how impossible the workload becomes when we have to seclude. I’ll write a second post about the additional demands after we give RT. But you don’t know why. And you never will know if you rely on official explanations.
This one – from an abstract – is a perfect example.
The Mental Health Act: Code of Practice (Department of Health and Social Care, 2015) called on (*) mental health services in England to actively reduce their use of restrictive practice, with the view of improving safety, as well as staff and patient wellbeing.
*) Try exchanging ‘called upon’ with ‘ordered’ if you’re at all interested in truth.
As I’ll show, it is impossible and against the laws of physics ‘to actively reduce their use of restrictive practice,’ and, at the same time, ‘improving safety.’ No-one can do both at the same time, since one pulls in the opposite direction to the other, but it is possible to heroically write a sentence pretending it does and to show you can believe six impossible things before breakfast.
A shortlist of the real reasons behind it all.
1. To punish ground floor nurses for secluding patients by making their workload impossibly ramp up.
2. To make it so impossible that we give up and let the patient out before they are safe.
3. To dump responsibility and culpability off the well-paid managers and Board onto the grunts on the ground floor – by the tried and foolproof method of writing standing orders whoops policies.
3. Because management have to obey national policies reducing restraint and seclusion. Because there are dozens of NGOs, Quangos and committees writing buckets of ‘guidelines’ about this topic that the DOH copy into national policy.
4. Similar to 3. Because Trusts are audited on whether they are reducing restraints and seclusions. Financial rewards and penalties will be consequent on to these audits. I intend to demonstrate how, where and how much, when I can.
5. This one is an ‘I think.’ I think our allegedly sovereign government (and others around the world) have signed binding agreements with supra-national bodies (WHO is definitely one of them) which give committees within these organisations the power to order us to structure our own health services, laws and so on to fit their own policies.
6. The ECHR and cartloads of grabbing ambulance chasers. Obviously.
Next post Seclusion Pt 4 will expand on some of these reasons and suggest how a new improved Tetley teabags British mental health services might do better.
Leave a Reply