1995-96 DMH Restraint and Seclusion Task Force
After complaints about the misuse of restraints / seclusion from a number of people who used Massachusetts Department of Mental Health Services and investigating those complaints, Commissioner Elaine Elias put together Restraint / Seclusion Task Force. After assessing the problem and gathering information, including looking into how other states were addressing the issue, the Task Force developed a series of recommendations on how to reduce the use of restraint/seclusion. Two members of the Task Force, Susan Stefan and Laura Prescott developed the first ever advance care proxy that set the stage for the currently used Safety Tool. The Task Force also set the stage for the development of new regulations which made using restraints or seclusion more difficult. These regulations included requiring staff to: check on people regularly while they were restrained, ask people using services about their preferences beforehand and documenting these preferences, and debrief people who experienced a restraint/seclusion afterword including an assessment of how to do things differently next time in order to avoid using restraints/seclusion. In addition, chemical restraint (forced medication) became regulated and considered separately from mechanical restraints.