Records & plans
What is restrictive physical intervention?
Restrictive physical intervention is the use of force to restrict a child's movement. In a children's home it is permitted only in narrow circumstances and must be recorded and reviewed.
The permitted grounds are narrow — preventing injury, significant damage to property, or the commission of an offence — and it must be necessary and proportionate in the circumstances.
Every use has to be recorded, and the record needs to include the child's own account of it. Reviewing them individually and as a pattern is what identifies whether something about the home is generating them.
Techniques come from an approved training system, and staff using them must be trained and their training current. Improvised restraint is both dangerous and indefensible.
In practice
An incident record being written an hour afterwards.
The member of staff writes what happened, who was involved, how long it lasted, and what the young person said afterwards. Then he writes that it was necessary and proportionate, because that is what he believes.
That last sentence should not be there. Whether an intervention was lawful and proportionate is a question decided on the facts by somebody else, and a self-assessment in the record is the first thing that will be taken apart.
What is worth far more is the part before the contact: what was tried, the space offered, the warning given, the time allowed. That is the section nobody remembers to write and the one that puts the rest in context.
What goes wrong in practice
- Used to secure compliance rather than to prevent harm.
- Records omitting the child's own account of what happened.
- Patterns across a home or a shift never reviewed.