http://goo.gl/6Le5AF
As a supposed measure of last resort, however, restraints are surprisingly common. A 2007 study in the Journal of Nursing Scholarship estimated that 27,000 patients are restrained every day in U.S. hospitals—an average of five patients per hospital per day.
In some situations, restraints may be ineffective and even harmful. Doctors and nurses often employ restraints when a patient is at risk for falling or delirious. However, evidence suggests that restraints do not reduce one’s risk of falling. Likewise, a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association suggested that restraints increase the risk of delirium in the hospital by 4-fold, possibly by increasing patients’ levels of anxiety and stress due to involuntary immobilization. Physical restraints and the resulting immobilization they cause are also associated with increased rates of pressure ulcers,respiratory complications—and even death via strangulation and aspiration. Even more disturbingly, a 2006 report by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services concluded that hospitals failed to report more than 40 percent of deaths related to restraints to The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
However, as one of my senior residents confided in me, when caring for the sickest patients in the hospital, restraining a delirious patient might be the only way to devote time to other seriously ill patients.