Policy Analysis on Aggression, Seclusion and Restraint in Mental Health Facilities in NSW

Running head: POLICY ANALYSIS
POLICY ANALYSIS
Name of the student:
Name of the university:
Author note:

1
POLICY ANALYSIS
Aggression, seclusion and restraint: Preventing, minimizing and managing disturbed
behavior in mental health facilities in NSW
Introduction:
Mental health patients often go through different types of mood disorders that make
them vulnerable to depression, sadness, violence, aggression, loneliness confusion and many
others. Among these mood disorders, being aggressive is one of the most significant issues
shown by the Healthcare consumers (Dunn, 2015). In such conditions, the mental health
patients can harm themselves as well as the others who are trying to provide them with the
service. Therefore, it becomes extremely important for the Healthcare professionals to be
well educated, knowledgeable and skilful to handle the situation of the patients effectively.
Such aggressions might make them suicidal; harm themselves as well as the nursing
professionals, verbally abusive to the nurses, and many others (Wagennar, 2014). Therefore,
there are many situations where the nursing professionals become confused about the
interventions that need to be taken in order to handle the situation of the patients effectively.
This might be due to lack of education and proper skills to help the patients or confusions of
the professionals about initiatives to be taken at the urgency of the moments (Neto, 2016). In
such situations, it is seen that the professionals take the resort of restraints and Seclusions
which harm the patient's autonomy and dignity, affect them mentally as well as physically. It
also results the professionals to suffer legally (Friedman, 2017). Therefore the policies are
required for helping the professionals learn about the effective guidelines which they can
follow to ensure proper Service Delivery to the patients and thereby reduce the application of
seclusion and restraint to patients. Therefore this policy has been chosen which sheds light on
the guidelines to be followed thereby helping the readers to understand the steps they can
take to help the mental health patients and reduce their applications of seclusion and restraints

2
POLICY ANALYSIS
Formulation of the problem:
This policy had provided a scope for the Healthcare professionals to understand the
different interventions and guidelines they should take under different situations to reduce the
level of harms on the patient due to their own aggression and thereby help them to come out
of this difficult phase and live a better quality life. However, the first step of the policy is
understanding the issues on which the policy should be based (Cobb et al., 2016). While
analysing the policy in details, a number of weakness has been observed in the formulation of
the problem for the policy. The policy has been proposed to maintain the safety of the
patients and to help the professionals follow proper guidelines to help the patients but they
have not been able to establish the importance and the depth of the issues that can take place
from the aggression of the patients. They had provided a very small section as risk and
sudden death which might result from the physical and mechanical restraints. However, these
two sections are not enough to establish the importance of following guidelines to mitigate
the issues (Diem et al., 2014). The policy makers have not been able to establish the depth of
the importance of the problems that arise when patients become aggressive. Moreover they
have not provided any statistical details of the different kinds of incidences that have taken
place in the different Health Care units of New South Wales and therefore the only one
statistical data provided does not suffice to provide a background for the entire policy
development. Another important aspect that has been missed is that the policy has only
mentioned about the negative aspects that takes place on the patients when the seclusion and
restraints are not provided properly or cause severe harm to the patients (Vedung, 2017).
However the entire policy did not at all developed any idea about how the Healthcare
professionals are also affected by the tremendous aggressions that take place from the
aggressive mental health consumers. Often researchers are of the opinion that the mental
health consumers become so aggressive that they might cause physical verbal as well as

3
POLICY ANALYSIS
mental assaults to the Healthcare professionals who serve them. Moreover, there are many
legal obligations that the healthcare professionals face while they serve the service users
(Berlin & Carlstorm, 2015). This might be due to lack of knowledge or due to an effective
decision making skills are due to loss of control over the situation when the aggression is
taking place. Such legal obligations can result the Healthcare professionals to get involved in
severe issues that affect their professional careers and also harm them mentally. Therefore
these issues should have been discussed in the policy so as to develop the main basis on
which the principles of caring would have been dependent. Depending upon these issues
only, the guidelines should have been developed and this would have provided the reader an
understanding about why the policy is important to be followed by the Healthcare
professionals (Cusack et al., 2016). Therefore the policy did not successfully participated in
formulating the problem although effective guidelines have been provided as interventions
for the issues and this makes the entire policy half-hearted.
Setting out objective and goals:
One important weakness that had been seen in the policy is that the policy is not clear
about its objectives and goals. For better understanding of the readers, the policy makers
should take care that the objectives and goals are present in clear distinctive sections so that
the readers can understand the interventions which are set for the goals (Stacey et al., 2016).
The policy is more focused on developing interventions about how the Healthcare
professionals would be able to provide evidence based care to patients in situations of
aggression and how well they can decide to take interventions or reduce the scopes of
restraints and secretions effectively without harming the autonomy and dignity of the persons
and respecting the wishes and demands of the family members and the patients. However the
policy does not clarify the objectives and goals upon which the policy is developed
(Wildavsky, 2018). Recent researches are of the opinion that better, the goals have smart