Violence: The Short-Term Management of Disturbed/Violent Behaviour in In-Patient Psychiatric Settings and Emergency Departments

The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) commissioned the National Collaborating Centre for Nursing and Supportive Care (NCC-NSC) to develop guidelines on the short-term management of disturbed/violent behaviour in adult psychiatric in-patient settings and emergency departments for mental health assessments. This follows referral of the topic by the Department of Health and Welsh Assembly Government. This document describes the methods for developing the guidelines and presents the resulting recommendations. It is the source document for the NICE short-form version, the Quick reference guide (the abridged version for health professionals) and the Information for the public (the version for patients and their carers), which will be published by NICE and be available on the NICE website (www.nice.org.uk). The guidelines were produced by a multidisciplinary Guideline Development Group (GDG) and the development process was undertaken by the NCC-NSC.

The main areas examined by the guideline were: environment and alarm systems, prediction (antecedents, warning signs and risk assessment), training, working with service users, de-escalation techniques, observation, physical interventions, seclusion, rapid tranquillisation, post-incident review, emergency departments, and searching.