| Summary: | In psychiatric inpatient settings, conflict behaviors such as patient aggression, agitation, and selfharm require immediate intervention to prevent physical and emotional injury to the patient, other patients, and staff. Seclusion is commonly used to manage conflict behaviors that place patients and staff at risk of immediate harm. Seclusion generally consists of involuntarily confining a patient alone in a restricted area until the patient's conflict behaviors subside. There is large variation in the use of seclusion across the United States (US). For example, 1 large study of psychiatric facilities in the US found seclusion was used for 0.3 per 1,000 patient hours; however, the interquartile range was wide (0.02 to 0.22). When these data were stratified by hospital type in unadjusted analyses in 2014, for-profit psychiatric hospitals used seclusion the least and Veteran Affairs (VA) hospitals used it the most (mean 0.1 [standard deviation (SD) 0.7] vs 0.4 [SD 0.8] per 1,000 patient hours)
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