Minnesota Security Hospital and restraints

When patients at the Minnesota Security Hospital in St. Peter are physically aggressive, how should staff respond? Should they put patients in restraints — and if so, which situations warrant that?

Minnesota Security Hospital employees are at odds with state administrators over those questions. Security counselors continue to advocate for mobile restraints to protect themselves from aggressive patients. But administrators at the Department of Human Services mostly banned restraints in 2012. The hospital has been on probation since the overuse of restraint and isolation.

MPR News' Tom Weber considers the question of restraints - and talks more broadly about how to balance the safety of patients and staff at the facility that houses 373 of the most violent and mentally ill people in Minnesota.