The members of Coercion Free Nebraska are committed to significantly and continually working to improve behavioral health care for youth across Nebraska. The membership believes that the use of restraint and seclusion presents significant risks to persons with disabilities and those who are entrusted with their care. Restraint and seclusion are not therapeutic interventions but rather safety interventions of last resort and should be utilized only when there exists an imminent risk of danger to the individual or others and all other less intrusive alternative interventions have been exhausted. Restraint and seclusion should not be utilized for discipline, coercion, staff convenience, or treatment.
It is the goal of Coercion Free Nebraska to foster a system of care for individuals and families that embraces and creates treatment environments that minimize coercion. To that end, Coercion Free Nebraska is further committed to prevent, reduce, and ultimately eliminate the use of physical, mechanical, and chemical restraints and seclusion in out of- home and residential treatment facilities across Nebraska.
Using restraint and seclusion presents significant safety
risks. Restraints are potentially physically dangerous and traumatizing
for both individuals and staff; the effects of trauma are pervasive on
a child’s overall well being. Subjecting individuals with a history
of trauma to any form of restraint can re-traumatize them, which could
significantly rollback recovery. Physical injuries and deaths resulting
from the use of restraint and seclusion present significant agency liabilities
from both individuals and staff. Finally, persons who are subject to restraint
and seclusion frequently experience a loss of dignity, further compromising
recovery and empowerment.
The members of Coercion Free Nebraska believe that transforming the current
culture in behavioral health care delivery systems is critical to establishing
coercion-free treatment environments and subsequently to prevent, reduce,
and ultimately eliminate restraint and seclusion. The transformed system
of care must borrow concepts and be influenced by lessons learned from
other delivery system models, such as a public health, trauma-informed,
and/or a recovery model. To ensure successful outcomes, the new system
should:
- Encourage public and private stakeholder commitment, collaboration, and leadership
- Design systems of care that are trauma-informed, emphasizing consumer and family empowerment
- Adopt an individual and family-centered approach
- Implement a public health prevention systems/delivery model with recovery, resiliency, and strength-based principles consistent with the President’s New Freedom Commission (2003) report.