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.
22 case entries and 8 publications.
The 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.
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.
The watcher who was talking
A patient in long-term segregation died while the nurse observing him stood in conversation outside the door.
PublicationThe law that defines restraint in mental health units, and stops at recording
The Mental Health Units (Use of Force) Act 2018 puts a statutory definition of restraint into English law and requires providers to name a responsible person, publish a…