Coroners, courts, regulators and inspectors have recorded what restraint does to the people it is used on. This casebook publishes those records as short, sourced case pages: what happened, what went wrong, and what it means for the people running the service.
Every entry states its confidence, what could not be verified, and where the source runs out. Where a case is still live, we hold it. Where a name cannot be justified, we do not print it. Publications are labelled as publications, because a national count is not an incident.
147 case entries and 47 publications.
Pain in restraint at a centre where 23 staff were suspended
A secure training centre holding children as young as 12 was issued with an urgent notification after inspectors found restraint that hurt children and staff conduct of serious…
Restrained on the floor after a ligature, and handcuffed as he went limp
An inquest jury found that unnecessary and disproportionate restraint caused the death of a man in prison healthcare.
Restraint used as a strategy for discipline, at a school that closed within weeks
Ofsted found pupils subjected to excessive force and unsafe holds, and staff who did not think they were restraining anyone.
PublicationScotland’s law on restraint in schools, and the door it stops at
The Restraint and Seclusion in Schools (Scotland) Act 2026 requires schools to record every incident and to tell parents when a child has been restrained or secluded. It…
PublicationTen of 27 custody deaths involved restraint, which is not ten restraint deaths
The IOPC's 2025/26 statistics record 27 deaths in or following police custody. Ten followed physical restraint by police, and the IOPC says restraint did not necessarily contribute.
PublicationThe abuse a CCTV review found, not an inspection
A public inquiry into Muckamore Abbey Hospital found physical abuse including inappropriate restraint on retained CCTV, and concluded that external inspection had failed to uncover it.
The camera showed it and the managers’ review did not
Ofsted rated a secure children's home inadequate after a child was harmed by staff during a restraint, and managers reviewing the CCTV did not identify it.
PublicationThe guidance that made last resort a written standard
Department of Health guidance published in 2014 tells adult health and social care staff that restraint is a last resort, sets out what that rules out, and names…
PublicationThe inquiry that found an inherently dangerous restraint technique
A public inquiry into an immigration removal centre found force used inappropriately against ten detainees, an "inherently dangerous" technique used on four, and footage that had been there…
A security guard held him down and no nurse watched
A 41-year-old man in delirium was restrained on a hospital floor by a security guard. The jury found he had been unlawfully killed.
Dragged across a kitchen, then written up as a fall
CCTV showed a nurse drag a resident to the floor on a night shift. His incident form called it a "witnessed fall", and he was struck off.
Eighteen minutes at category two, with police holding him on the floor
A 31-year-old man in acute behavioural disturbance was restrained on a social club floor while the ambulance call stayed at the wrong priority. He died the next day.
PublicationHandcuffs as the default in immigration detention
A national monitoring report found force in immigration detention applied for operational convenience, with one board reporting that nearly every hospital escort it saw during 2024 and early…
PublicationScotland’s first national count of restraint in children’s homes
A regulator has begun publishing how often restraint and seclusion are used on children in residential care. The bulletin carrying the numbers could not be retrieved, and this…
A radio under a jumper, and hands instead of words
Ofsted found restraint used for compliance at a secure children's home, including holds applied to move a child out of a room and to retrieve a concealed radio.
PublicationSeven of the ten heaviest PAVA users are youth prisons
The chairs of the prison monitoring boards wrote to the prisons minister about the direction of use of force, and put a number on the youth estate's share…
Seventeen staff in the room, and nobody said stop
Inspectors watched CCTV of a patient kicked and hit during a restraint while colleagues looked on. One of them smiled at the camera.
PublicationSix hundred thousand restraint reports, and not one of them a death
According to Home Office figures, 812,447 use of force reports were recorded in England and Wales in the year to March 2025, 628,307 of them involving a restraint…
PublicationThe only England-wide count of deaths near restraint
Fourteen detained patients died within seven days of restraint for 2024/25. The number is a notification count, not a cause of death, and the difference matters.
A restraint performed as a demonstration
Undercover filming at a secure hospital showed a patient told to lie on the floor so a carer could show a hold to colleagues.
A well-run school, three batteries and fourteen unlawful imprisonments
A former pupil was restrained face down three times and shut in his room with a towel across the doorway. The court found the school outstanding in other…
An 80-year-old with dementia, restrained for a night transfer
An inquest found that an 80-year-old man with dementia died of natural causes significantly contributed to by an inappropriate, lengthy transfer between hospitals.
PublicationSame law, same definitions, a seventeen-fold difference in restraint
Scotland counted 6,263 incidents of physical restraint across children's residential services in 2024. The rate per place, not the total, is the number that teaches.
Shoved into a padded room and left there for hours
CCTV from a London special school showed autistic children restrained by the neck and shut in windowless padded rooms.
A child said they could not breathe, and nobody asked why
An Ofsted inspection found a child held on the floor saying they could not breathe, and a registered manager who did not question it.
Died on his first night after a restraint nobody treated as an emergency
A remand prisoner who had swallowed cocaine was restrained on the floor, seen by a nurse who did not declare a medical emergency, and pronounced dead at 2.13am.
PublicationThe standard a restraint course is judged against
The Restraint Reduction Network Training Standards set what a UK restraint training provider must teach and what it must be able to show. They bind providers; they are…
The chain that stayed on through an endoscopy
A prisoner vomiting blood was escorted to hospital in a chain that came off only when staff told the officers he was dying.
The watcher who was talking
A patient in long-term segregation died while the nurse observing him stood in conversation outside the door.
He called an ambulance for his heart, then said he could not breathe
Andrew McCleary was restrained for eighteen minutes so he could be taken to hospital. A jury found he was unlawfully killed.