A System`s Approach to Restraint Reduction

Reducing and eliminating the use of restraints is a long-standing goal in the field of residential care of children and adolescents. Much of the time restraints can reduce imminent risk of physical harm to young people and adult caregivers, but these high risk interventions have also been known to result in harmful consequences for young people including re-traumatization, damage to relationships between children and adults, injury, and death. These are only a few of the possible negative outcomes of restraint that validate continued efforts by the field to reduce the need for this type of intervention to crisis. Since the early 80`s the Residential Child Care Project at Cornell University has been conducting research and developing programs to assist in this effort. This workshop will describe five important domains for implementing an effective crisis prevention and management system, and reducing the use of restraints.

Some agencies make the mistake of assuming that training direct care staff in crisis prevention and intervention is sufficient to prepare them to safely and successfully respond to challening and sometimes dangerous behavior by young people. In fact, much more is needed. The five domains of an effective crisis prevention and managment system inlcude: leadership and program support, supervision and post crisis response, clinical oversight, training and competency standards, and documentation and critical incident monitoring. Participants will learn about the important criteria for each domain, and have an opportunity to assess the strengths and needs of their own organizations crisis prevention and management system.