Guidelines for the use of Restraint in young people with Anorexia through Collaborative Engagement (grace)

This project is about the use of restraint in providing nutrition during the treatment for Anorexia Nervosa and Atypical Anorexia Nervosa in young people in children’s hospitals or children’s wards in Australia. We know through lived experience, our professional practice and the research evidence, that being held or restrained for a procedure can cause distress and trauma. However healthcare professionals have no specific guidance about restraining young people with AN or AAN for feeding in children’s hospitals in Australia. Therefore in this project we would like to interview young adults with lived experience of being held or restrained as an adolescent for tube placement or feeding in the context of treatment of AN or AAN, their parents/carers, and hospital staff who have been involved in the decision to restrain or undertaking restraint, to form an understanding of how restraint for feeding is experienced.

We then propose to write a guideline informed by this lived experience. We hope that a guideline will help reduce the need to restrain young people with AN or AAN during feeding, and if restraining is required, we will have guidance to do this in a way that causes the least distress and trauma. While we acknowledge this is a difficult and potentially distressing subject to talk about, we strongly believe that the voices of those involved are essential to developing an informed guideline.

This project has been developed through collaboration with three young people and two parents with lived experience of restraint for feeding during the treatment of AN and AAN, and we have detailed distress management plan. All interviews will be facilitated by an experienced mental health nurse. We have ethics approval from the RCH HREC.