In the case of corona sickness, hospitals that accept corona-positive patients have difficulty in conventional care due to restrictions on visits and lack of medical resources.Comprehensive care, especially for people with dementia, is susceptible.Physical restraints for patients with dementia have merits such as fall prevention, but should be avoided as ethically as possible.The research group examined changes in the rate of physical restraint performed on patients with dementia due to corona sickness.

　The study used the Japanese administrative database to extract patients aged 2019 and over who received dementia care between January 1 and July 2021 (7 weeks).In each of the corona patient acceptance hospital group (78 cases) and the non-acceptance hospital group (65 cases), the physical restraint implementation rate per 97,233 patients was calculated every two weeks.Using the "divided time series analysis", we verified how the rate of physical restraint implementation within each hospital group changed in response to the state of emergency announced by the Japanese government.As a result, unlike the hospitals that did not accept corona patients, the hospitals that accepted corona patients showed an increase in the rate of physical restraint implementation after the declaration of emergency.

　The medical staff working at the Corona patient reception hospital may have had an impact on this result due to the heavy mental and physical burdens such as increased workload, high risk of infection, and slander.This study focused on the first wave of infection, and the situation may have changed since then, but since there is a possibility that similar effects will occur when the infection re-spreads in the future, medical personnel are in parallel with infection control. He points out that physical and mental care of the patient should also be considered.

Paper information:[PLOS ONE] Physical restraint of dementia patients in acute care hospitals during the COVID-19 pandemic: A cohort analysis in Japan