Restraint use in home care: a qualitative study from a nursing perspective

BMC Geriatrics

Research Article

Bernadette Dierckx de Casterlé¹  Koen Milisen²  Steven Boonen³  Hendrik Van Gansbeke⁴  Louis Paquay⁴  Kristien Scheepmans⁵ 

[1] Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Centre for Health Services and Nursing Research, KU Leuven, Kapucijnenvoer 35, 4th Floor, 3000, Leuven, Belgium;Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Centre for Health Services and Nursing Research, KU Leuven, Kapucijnenvoer 35, 4th Floor, 3000, Leuven, Belgium;Division of Geriatric Medicine, Leuven University Hospital, Herestraat 49, 3000, Leuven, Belgium;Division of Geriatric Medicine, Leuven University Hospital, Herestraat 49, 3000, Leuven, Belgium;Leuven University Center for Metabolic Bone Diseases, KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium;Nursing Department, Wit-Gele Kruis van Vlaanderen, Brussels, Belgium;Nursing Department, Wit-Gele Kruis van Vlaanderen, Brussels, Belgium;Department of Public Health and Primary Care, Centre for Health Services and Nursing Research, KU Leuven, Kapucijnenvoer 35, 4th Floor, 3000, Leuven, Belgium;

关键词: Home care;    Physical restraints;    Nursing;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2318-14-17

 received in 2013-06-27, accepted in 2014-02-04,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundDespite the growing demand for home care and preliminary evidence suggesting that the use of restraint is common practice in home care, research about restraint use in this setting is scarce.MethodsTo gain insight into the use of restraints in home care from the perspective of nurses, we conducted a qualitative explorative study. We conducted semi-structured face-to-face interviews of 14 nurses from Wit-Gele Kruis, a home-care organization in Flanders, Belgium. Interview transcripts were analyzed using the Qualitative Analysis Guide of Leuven.ResultsOur findings revealed a lack of clarity among nurses about the concept of restraint in home care. Nurses reported that cognitively impaired older persons, who sometimes lived alone, were restrained or locked up without continuous follow-up. The interviews indicated that the patient’s family played a dominant role in the decision to use restraints. Reasons for using restraints included “providing relief to the family” and “keeping the patient at home as long as possible to avoid admission to a nursing home.” The nurses stated that general practitioners had no clear role in deciding whether to use restraints.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that the issue of restraint use in home care is even more complex than in long-term residential care settings and acute hospital settings. They raise questions about the ethical and legal responsibilities of home-care providers, nurses, and general practitioners. There is an urgent need for further research to carefully document the use of restraints in home care and to better understand it so that appropriate guidance can be provided to healthcare workers.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Scheepmans et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.