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Six years of national mental health seclusion data: the Australian experience
John A Allan1, Gary D Hanson2, Nicole L Schroder3
1Chief Psychiatrist, Department of Health Queensland and Chair, Safety and Quality Partnership Standing Committee, Herston, QLD, Australia.
Objectives:
Reducing or eliminating seclusion from mental health care settings has been a national priority for Australia since 2005. This paper describes Australia's national seclusion data collection, and summarises changes in seclusion rates in Australian public mental health services.
Methods:
Seclusion events per 1000 patient days were calculated from 2009-2010 to 2014-2015 utilising state and territory administrative data sources. Combined national data were used to calculate results for a number of service characteristics, such as target population and location of the service.
Results:
The rate of seclusion events decreased by 43% over the 6 years. Child and adolescent services reported consistently higher rates of seclusion, but a shorter duration of seclusion episodes, compared with other service types. There is high variation in seclusion rates between individual services (range 0.0-53.0 seclusion events per 1000 bed days in 2014-2015).
Conclusions:
Seclusion event rates in Australia's specialised public acute mental health hospital services are declining. The use of existing administrative data was instrumental in establishing a national data source to facilitate the monitoring and reporting of progress of seclusion reduction strategies.