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Policies regarding coercive care in Swedish child and adolescent psychiatry
BMC Psychiatry volume 7, Article number: S105 (2007)
Background
To investigate the routines for involuntary admissions and treatment according to the Swedish Compulsory Psychiatric Care Act in Swedish child and adolescent psychiatry.
Methods
A questionnaire specially designed for the study was sent to the heads of all 24 child and adolescent psychiatric clinics in Sweden. Responses were received from 23 of them.
Results
A great variation was found between the different clinics regarding the estimated numbers of involuntarily admitted patients and the practice regarding local guidelines for involuntary hospitalization and treatment, information to patients and relatives, and follow-up of coercive measures. There was a notable difference in the handling of voluntarily admitted inpatients that were also coercively placed simultaneously in the legal custody of social services.
Conclusion
There was no uniform, nationwide practice regarding coercive care in Swedish child and adolescent psychiatry. The legal prerequisites are unclear for inpatients simultaneously in the legal custody of social services, and the legal rights of the individual in these cases may be questioned.
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Open Access This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Kjellin, L. Policies regarding coercive care in Swedish child and adolescent psychiatry. BMC Psychiatry 7 (Suppl 1), S105 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-244X-7-S1-S105
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-244X-7-S1-S105