Hospitals to avoid using dangerous hold on patients

NSW HEALTH will abandon a controversial policy allowing hospitals to use a potentially deadly restraint technique to control patients with psychiatric illnesses.

The ''prone restraint'' position, where patients are held face-down on the ground, often with heavy pressure from body weight on top of them, has been linked to hundreds of deaths in Australia and overseas.

Victorian and British hospitals are told not to use the position, and earlier this year, a deputy state coroner in NSW requested the health department review its use of prone restraint after a woman with schizophrenia was asphyxiated by hospital staff.   More Read