The Incidence Of Self-Injury In Medical Care

The incidence of self-injury was 0.08% in 2012 and has increased 0.05% compared with 2011 in our psychiatric ward. The main causes were the access control is not precise enough by security personnel, lack of consensus by medical care staff on the principle of leave, careless caregivers, people who go out without sufficient understanding or willingness to cooperate with the procedures for security checks, lack of nails management, too many visitors. To reduce the incidence of patient self-injury, efforts were made through strengthening the consensus on procedures for access control, harmonizing the medical care teams on the principle of leaving, and augmenting the effectiveness of caregivers at caring high self-injury risk cases, establishing
the agreement on “providing card of accompanying”, setting up the standard operating procedure on “Explanation of procedures of security checks for first time leaving”, establishing nails management, revising the regulations for visiting. The outcomes show that the incidence of patient self-injury dropped from 0.08% to 0.01% in 2013. Besides, the number of dangerous goods in the ward is reduced, and the safety of hospitalizing is further enhanced.