What happened
Muirhead Care Home stands near Alford in Aberdeenshire and looked after 35 residents. It had provided care for 30 years.
The Care Inspectorate’s 2018 inspection found what its chief executive, Karen Reid, called “highly distressing conditions”: “We saw evidence of vulnerable people being tied to chairs with belts, which is extremely dangerous and unacceptable.”
Residents were not getting enough food, there were not enough staff, and some people were not given essential medicines. The Inspectorate found “a lack of appreciation as to why these things are so unacceptable”, and identified problems with staffing levels, training and experience.
It applied to the sheriff court, which granted an interim suspension order pending a full hearing on closure. The home was told it could not operate after 31 August 2018.
The outcome
The home closed. Residents were moved to other homes, arranged by the Aberdeenshire Health and Social Care Partnership. The operator later went into liquidation.
The Inspectorate referred individuals to nursing regulators and to the police. Three people were arrested in December 2018. In 2021 the Crown Office said the report concerning a 78-year-old woman, a 79-year-old man and a 57-year-old woman, covering alleged incidents between 7 September 2015 and 31 August 2018, had been dealt with by an offer of an alternative to prosecution.
No criminal proceedings followed.
What went wrong
Restraint here was not an incident. It was the house style. People were tied to chairs with belts, which means the practice was established, visible and repeated, and nobody in the building was treating it as a safeguarding matter.
It did not travel alone. The same inspection found hunger, missing medicines and too few staff. That combination is the finding. Where there are not enough staff, and where nobody recognises tying someone to a chair as dangerous, the belt is doing work that care should be doing.
The phrase about a lack of appreciation points at management, not at one pair of hands.
What it teaches
When restraint is the house style rather than an incident, the regulator’s lever is the registration, not the individual. The criminal route closed with an alternative to prosecution. The service was closed by court order.
Read the rota and the medicine round before you read the restraint record. A home that ties people to chairs is usually also short of staff, short of food and missing drugs, and the belt is the visible end of that.
Thirty years of providing care is not evidence that a practice is safe. It is evidence that nobody had looked hard enough.
Questions for the room
- What would you have to see on a ward to know that belts on chairs had become normal?
- You are the manager and you are short-staffed every night. What do you do that does not end with someone tied to a chair?
- The home had provided care for 30 years. What does a long good record do to the scrutiny a service receives?
Evidence and limits
Confidence: confirmed. Two independent outlets reported the sheriff court order and the Inspectorate’s findings, and the no-proceedings outcome is a Crown Office statement quoted by the BBC. No resident is identified in any source and none is named here. The three people arrested are described by age and sex only. The sources differ on one age: police gave 56 for the younger woman, the Crown Office 57. The record does not say what alternative to prosecution was offered.
No member of staff is named on this page. An alternative to prosecution is not a conviction, and a referral to a regulator is not a finding.
Our physical interventions training covers the alternatives to a belt on a chair, and what a manager does when the rota will not stretch.
Sources
Reviewed 20 October 2026.