Step 8: Advocate the System of Safety to the Stakeholders

Often times parents or advocates will ask questions that, although we can answer them, they still don’t believe us and want to speak to an outside authority. When we try to do what we know is right and explain it we still get strongly criticized.

We see other organizations getting sued and are quite concerned about litigation related to restraint. It almost seems like when we accept an individual with extreme behavioral needs, we are automatically exposing ourselves to increased risk of litigation. It’s difficult enough working with those with severe behavior problems, we don’t need the constant worry about litigation.

In the event that we are sued we are concerned that the training organization will offer little or no support either directly or as a resource for us to find an appropriate expert somewhere else.

We have many policies regarding the use of restraint at our organization. It’s hard for us to comb through them all to look for potential legal problems with the wording. In the past we have had huge problems over the use of a single word in our policies.

Our organization requires us to collect all sorts of restraint-related data. We are concerned that once we start collecting it that it may be used against us by stakeholders. We have heard of several organizations being judged critically based on the number of restraints they showed and we don’t want to become one of those organizations.

I want to know that an authority will be willing to speak to any and all of our stakeholders. I don’t just want them to occasionally communicate directly with them, but I need them to provide satisfactory answers to all of the stakeholder’s questions.

I don’t want to wait for someone else to find a problem with restraint use at my organization, I would like to have a systematic way of evaluating any vulnerabilities and correcting them BEFORE we have litigation.

In the event of litigation I want to have access to an expert witness, and not just someone who works in the field, but someone who also knows the details of our crisis management system as well the needs of our organization.

We would like an outside organization that understands the importance of internal policies and how they must align with state and local policies and can help us reconcile any mismatch between our the needs of our clients/students and the needs of local, state and federal agencies.

We need someone to show us which data are the most important to collect, but we also need to be made fully aware the responsibilities that come with good data collection. We want someone to help us use to our data to show the great work we are doing while minimizing the chances that someone will try to take our good faith effort and use it against us.