Back in 2013, my team and I had the opportunity to demonstrate the use of the Emergency Response Belt to our healthcare authority clients in Dubai. With a very busy Emergency Department, taking hundreds of cases every day, the staff were sometimes having to deal with very upset, frustrated and distressed psychiatric patients presenting at the ED. Sometimes, the staff would have to deal with drug-addicts, strung out and very violent, demanding to be seen by a doctor and for a prescription to be signed! On surveying the staff and doing an analysis on the violence risk in the ED (they were having a Code Black incident on average every 48 hours) we determined that they would benefit from seeing how a soft restraint system could reduce the risk and improve control of, for example, a violent psych patient who needed to be brought into safety and then transported to the appropriate ward for assessment and treatment. I remember doing these demonstrations and feeling that the approach we advocated was safer, more orderly and less frenetic than an approach that has the patient strapped to a gurney with bandages and shot full of tranquillising meds!
