Abstract
Background: The goal of restraint alternatives is to keep the patient safe without compromising treatment and allowing for free movement of all extremities. Providing education and having a table readily available highlighting restraint alternatives will increase clinicians’ comfort with using alternatives prior to restraints. This quality improvement project created education and resources for nurses that increased the comfort level of restraint alternatives within the inpatient setting using a quasi-experimental design.|Methods: The setting included registered nurses on the telemetry and medical intensive care units of a 300 bed intercity, teaching hospital in the Midwest. A pretest and posttest was used to measure knowledge and comfort level of nurses surrounding restraint alternatives. Upon completion of the pretest, educational sessions were held providing focused education on restraint alternatives. There was an emphasis on types of available alternatives and each participant was given a pocket tool card highlighting different options depending on the need for the restraint.|Results: Thirty-four paired pretests and posttests were analyzed using a Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test. Six out of the seven questions were statistically significant; the one question not showing statistical significance focused on nurses exhausting all restraint alternatives prior to initiating restraints. Seventy-eight percent of participants stated an increase in restraint alternative use, while all but one participant ranked a response of agree or strongly agree when asked if the educational sessions met the educational needs that emphasized restraint alternatives.|Conclusion: Readily available information on alternatives can help to trigger alternative use. This quality improvement project showed that alternative intense education can shift the focus from early restraint application to early restraint alternative use.