The charge nurse found Alexis Evette Richie alone in a small room at SSM DePaul Health Center, motionless and sprawled facedown on a bean bag chair. Minutes earlier, the 16-year-old foster child had tried to hit, scratch and bite staff members in the adolescent psychiatric ward. Two aides grabbed her arms and took her down a hall and into a small room called the “quiet room.”
They held her facedown in the chair while a nurse injected a sedative into her hip. Alexis continued to struggle and then went limp. The nurse and the two aides left without checking her pulse or making sure she was breathing. Charge nurse Iris Blanks checked on her minutes later and didn’t think Alexis looked right. An aide helped Blanks roll the girl over. Alexis wasn’t breathing. Her pulse was faint. It was 12 minutes after she stopped moving before anyone tried to revive Alexis. By then it was too late.
Dr. Wanda Mohr and I did a teleseminar on the topic of death in restraints. She talked about a colleague of hers who did a study of pediatric deaths from restraints. Just simply looking at lawsuits and newspaper articles, within that 10-year period he found that 45 deaths had occurred and those deaths were specifically limited to children. The youngest child who had died was 6-year-old. The most common mechanism of death is restraint asphyxia. A person essentially asphyxiates or chokes to death. Her oxygen is cut off and that, most commonly, occurs in a prone position. This is associated with individuals actually putting pressure on people’s back and their lower back and despite their pleas that they were unable to breathe, the staff would not let the person up.
For a death in another treatment center, read about a 17-year-old boy who was strangled while being restrained.
One child dying of being restrained is far too many. There are safe ways to help agitated or violent people get back under control. Any healthcare provider working in a setting where this type of behavior could occur should know how to protect the patient (as well as the healthcare workers) from injury.
Excellent information, though very sad.
Although, having just read another article about typos in records and signs, etc, I could not help but notice that the title to this article might need to be altered a bit, since I know the author did not restrain this patient.