What this is
Mind’s report on physical restraint in hospital settings in England, published in June 2013. The charity sent Freedom of Information requests to all 54 mental health trusts in England asking how restraint was used, what impact it had, and what procedures and training governed it. Independent providers were not approached.
It combined those returns with interviews with people who had been restrained or had witnessed restraint. It is a survey and a policy report, not a regulator’s inspection.
What it records
According to Mind’s report, the figures describe one year of inpatient restraint across England, and Mind is their originating publisher.
One trust reported 38 incidents in that year. Another reported over 3,000. Neither figure is an error. With no national framework, each trust counted and trained in its own way.
Face-down restraint, according to the same report, was used more than 3,000 times in the year. There were almost 1,000 incidents of physical injury following restraint.
Mind counts at least 13 deaths of people detained under the Mental Health Act 1983 since 1998 as restraint-related, eight of them in 2011, on its own classification.
On responses: Mind records 51 of the 54 trusts, with three not replying, one declining on grounds of cost and time, and one saying its system could not produce the data.
Mind’s conclusions were that England had no national framework governing physical restraint and no accredited training for healthcare staff, and that training was variable and unaccredited. It described face-down restraint as life-threatening because of its effect on breathing, and recommended that it end in all healthcare settings and be added to the list of “never events”. It recommended national standards, accredited training endorsed by people who have experienced restraint, and a requirement on services to reduce reliance on restraint. It noted that some trusts had ended face-down restraint altogether.
How to read it
The variation is the finding. A trust reporting 38 incidents and a trust reporting several thousand can both be accurate, because nothing required them to count the same thing. That is also why these numbers cannot be turned into a national rate: there is no denominator.
This is a survey, not a finding against anyone. It names no trust and decides nothing about any incident.
On face-down restraint, the claim is about the position and its effect on breathing, not about any individual death. On the 13 deaths, that is Mind’s own classification, and the sections read for this page do not set out how the charity identified them. Do not add them to, or compare them with, any other body’s count: different publishers count different things.
And the recommendations are recommendations. Mind recommended an end to face-down restraint; services and regulators decided what followed.
Where it stops
England, NHS mental health trusts, one year of practice before June 2013. Independent providers were not approached, so a substantial part of the inpatient sector is absent from the returns. It is evidence about the period before 2013 and says nothing about what happened after it.
The report was read at its executive summary, foreword and opening findings sections. The underlying trust returns are not in the record, so no figure here has been checked back to a trust’s own return. Confidence: probable.
Sources
Where a service is deciding what its own restraint figures mean, our physical interventions training covers the position, the monitoring, and why a count without a definition tells you nothing.
Reviewed 20 October 2026.