Background: Psychiatric nurses are regularly confronted with the uses and effects of control interventions such as mechanical restraints. Although there are evident tensions in the literature regarding the use of mechanical restraints, very little research has focused on the lived and embodied experience of their use, whether from the patient's perspective or the perspective of nursing staff responsible for their application.
Research Aims: (1) to gain access to the bodily phenomenon of being placed in mechanical restraints; (2) to give voice to the intimate experiential understanding of this experience; and (3) through phenomenological interpretation, to understand the subjective processes and meaning-making of this experience.
The use of mechanical restraints in psychiatric settings is currently the subject of ethical controversy. However, both patients' and nurses' voices are absent in the debate over this controversial intervention. The objective of this qualitative study was to examine the experience of psychiatric nurses using mechanical restraints.
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