Exploring Routine Practices of Coercion in Acute Child and Adolescent Psychiatry - Reflections for Practice.
Ann-Karina Henriksen, Esben Olesen, Trine Brinkman and 1 others
PMID 42095459WHAT IT FOUND
In acute child and adolescent psychiatric wards, coercion was routine.
Staff used discharge, medication, and tube feeding threats to gain compliance, while patients withdrew or resisted.
Key findings
01Coercion was routine in acute child and adolescent psychiatric wards, while formal coercion was used only briefly.
02Staff used discharge to pressure a patient into cooperating with medication.
03A nutrition order allowed staff to move toward tube feeding when a patient refused voluntary intake, making formal coercion an implicit threat.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they foundWhat it means for RNs
Read the rest of this summary
You get three full summaries a month, free, and we do not ask for a card. Search, the TL;DRs and your library stay unlimited either way.
What it does not show
The fieldwork was short, so researchers did not fully learn routines or build close relationships. Patients stayed briefly and could be withdrawn because of severe illness. Some researchers were Danish, which constrained some communication. The wards were not a representative sample, and the reported situations are illustrative cases rather than evidence of how often coercion occurs in all units.
Declared interests
No funding or conflicts of interest are reported. The authors declare no AI tools were used.
The easy way to misread this
Do not read this as evidence that a specific practice reduces coercion. It describes what was observed and reported in an ethnographic study, not a tested intervention.