Mental Health Safety

The Mental Health programme aims to improve safety by reducing harm caused to people using mental health, learning disabilities and autism inpatient services by 2023.

To contribute to the programme’s aim, the Patient Safety Collaborative will focus on creating safer inpatient mental health and learning disability services by using a systematic quality improvement approach to reduce restrictive practices.

Restrictive practices cause both physical and psychological harm to patients and are often retraumatising to an already vulnerable patient group.

The use of restrictive practice can impact negatively on staff who either use restrictive interventions on patients themselves or who witness them.

The CQC’s 2017 State of Care review of mental health and learning disability services, observe and report large variation in practice, and the recently published (December 2021) Department of Health and Social Care’s Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act 2018 statutory guidance, reports that there is still work to do.

The Mental Health programme will continue to scale up and spread the reducing restrictive practice theory of change and change package, developed and refined for the MHSIP by the National Collaborating Centre for Mental Health (NCCMH) in a national reducing restrictive practice pilot collaborative, across a greater number of wards and organisations.