In a government setting, we often face this kind of situations where patients demand to leave the hospital. I faced one such situation recently, where a female patient from my ward was trying to escape. The sister in charge of ward called me and I rushed to the ward as I was not able to recollect which patient was this. The sister told me that she was admitted in the afternoon and since then she was trying to escape. I tried to convince her hard, but she just rushed off the door and tried getting into an auto.
I grabbed her arm and took her back to the ward. Later, I went through her clinical notes and discovered that she was admitted for the complaints of confusion secondary to infection. I feel doctors can restrain patients physically in such cases. Do you think it is ok to physically restrain a patient?
