Page 55 - Reduction of coercive measures

Reporting coercive measures
Research limitations/implications
Many concepts in the new Dutch Care and Coercion Act are not formally defined. Instead, the legislator has left it to those in the field to decide how they should be interpreted. This prompted many questions from those attending the expert meeting and in our own analysis. The researchers could possibly have resolved this confusion during the meeting by formulating more detailed definitions of terms such as “resistance” and “involuntary care” beforehand. The disadvantage of this, however, would have been that those attending the meeting would have had no opportunity to define the terms on the basis of their own expertise. As a result, the researchers have obtained all relevant information comprehensively to use as the input for the next step of the research, which employs the Delphi method.
Practical implications
This viewpoint emphasizes the need to take a wide range of factors into account throughout the process in order to establish whether care can be seen as involuntary. The researchers regard the care providers’ expertise in dealing with these factors – client factors, and behavioral or environmental factors, for example – as being of essential importance if care is to be recognized as involuntary and reported as effectively as possible. Therefore, the researchers discuss whether the legal position of clients is protected if care providers register only those forms of involuntary care where there is obvious resistance. In this case, many forms of resistance are overlooked, which may be to the detriment of the legal protection of clients with intellectual disabilities. However, the system in the UK shows that it can be quite complicated to develop a clear definition of involuntary care that is usable in practice, without giving rise to an enormous amount of bureaucracy and thus distracting from the real issue: protecting the legal position of clients with an intellectual disability.
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