Perspectives and Experiences of People Receiving Care on a De‐escalation Intervention to Reduce Restrictive Practices in Acute Mental Health Units

ABSTRACT

Interventions aimed at reducing restrictive practices are also designed to enhance the service experience in acute mental health units. However, people with experience of coercive engagement with these services are seldom involved as active contributors in evaluative research on interventions to reduce restrictive practices. With the meaningful involvement of lived experience practitioners, this research was aimed at examining care recipients' service experiences and perspectives on nurses' therapeutic responses during the implementation of a de‐escalation intervention in three adult inpatient units within New South Wales, Australia, from March 2024 to April 2025. Nested within a larger study employing a mixed concurrent control design, this research evaluated the effectiveness and process of the Safe Steps for De‐escalation through comparisons of unmatched measures of empowerment, dehumanisation, and staff actions on violence prevention across three time points, as well as through a reflective thematic analysis of semi‐structured interviews. Safe Steps is a structured approach for therapeutic responding, targeting nurses' relationship‐promotion behaviours to increase focus on minimising the use of restrictive practices. Eighty‐six inpatients completed the unmatched measures, with nine participating in interviews following discharge. No significant changes were noted in quantitative measures over time. Five themes emerged from the qualitative analysis: (i) Clarity calms; confusion harms , (ii) Control cuts deep , (iii) Systems strain; people break , (iv) Connection is treatment in itself, and (v) Meaning‐making outweighs medicine . These findings cast acute inpatient units in a light akin to a power circuit, elevating the need to make inpatient admissions more reflective of everyday life outside the units.