Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps his Department has taken to support quality improvement programmes aimed at reducing the use of restrictive practices in mental health settings.

NHS England and NHS Improvement published the ‘NHS Patient Safety Strategy, safer culture, safer systems, safer patients’ in July 2019. Within this is the Mental Health Safety Improvement Programme which supports mental health trusts with their individual safety priorities as well as around challenges which are common across the local systems. This work includes quality improvement to reduce the use of restrictive practices.

Work continues through NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Patient Safety Collaboratives to identify interventions which will have a measurable impact in reducing the use of restrictive practices.