Safewards

What is Safewards?

Safewards is a set of ten practices aimed at making our units safer and more peaceful environments for both staff and patients.

How does Safewards do this?
By reducing conflict and containment.

• Conflict (or patient action) is defined within the model as patient behaviors that threaten their safety and the safety of others
• Containment (or staff action) is defined within the model as things staff do to prevent conflict events from occurring or seek to minimize the harmful outcomes.

Why is this important?

The model recognizes that conflict and containment are in a dynamic reciprocal relationship. Meaning that at times, the use of containment strategies can cause conflict events and other times, conflict events can cause the use of containment strategies.

Safewards is an evidence-based (20+ years of research) best practice model of care out of England, which has been proved to reduce conflict on the units.

Safewards toolkit

The North Bay Regional Health Centre began introducing Safewards to our organization in January 2016, and have successfully implemented the new model of care on more than 11 units in that time. It has been implemented in all inpatient mental health units, outpatient services and the implementation of non-mental health services began in 2017.

This toolkit was developed and is available to share at no cost to you. Our hope is that the work we have done will make the implementation of Safewards easier for other organizations. The only requirement is we ask you follow the open sourced intent of Safewards and share this at no cost to others.