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How do ligature alarmed doors enhance safety in mental health?

Mental health care providers across the globe share a common responsibility to ensure the safety of their service users while supporting them through their most vulnerable times.

Care teams work tirelessly to ensure this, but there remains work to be done collectively as an industry until the number of inpatient suicides within mental health care facilities is reduced to zero. At Kingsway Group, as Your Partner in Patient Safety it is our mission to support you in improving safety within challenging environments, and with it, improve patient outcomes.

 

Are mental health facilities safe?

Safety in modern mental health environments is improving, and through co-production and greater consideration of service users’ needs during the design and refurbishment of modern care facilities, so too are patient outcomes. However, serious incidents can and do still take place, and as such there is still need for improvement.

In mental health environments, over 65% of inpatient suicides occur in the service user’s bedroom, and over 90% take place in between intermittent observations (NCHISH, 2016). To continue to reduce figures such as these, at Kingsway Group we continuously collaborate with mental health care providers to identify the key challenges faced and innovate new solutions to address them.

With the prevalence of inpatient suicides under intermittent observation, mental health care providers expressed the need to support their staff further and increase awareness of high-risk events across wards in real time. In response, our design engineers developed the Kingsway DTM door top ligature monitor and the world’s first full-door edge ligature alarm system – SENTRY – systems that are now trusted in over 200 mental health care environments across the globe to enhance patient safety.

 

How do ligature monitor alarms support mental health care teams?

One of the greatest challenges mental health care teams face is maintaining awareness of real-time activity across multiple locations concurrently within a ward. This is due in part to the fact that staff are simply unable to be everywhere at once. Additional pressures such as staff shortages or pool/agency staff not being familiar with the ward or its patients only exacerbate the challenges further – factors highlighted by the UK’s CQC as potentially increasing the risk of inpatient suicide on wards, explaining that “good therapeutic engagement relies on having the right staff with the right skills and support and – critically – the time to spend with patients to build trust and rapport” and that “wards with lower staff turnover have fewer deaths by suicide”. 

Ligature monitor alarms offer vital support to mental health care staff, both for sufficiently-staffed care teams and those requiring the support of agency/pool staff, acting almost as an additional set of eyes in high-risk environments. They help increase staff’s awareness of high-risk incidents in real time, in turn improving their ability to respond correctly.

Our SENTRY full door edge alarm system, for example, features integrated ligature monitors covering all 3 exposed door edges; the top, leading, and bottom edges. If pressure is detected by these ligature monitors, the SENTRY system will automatically trigger the ward’s staff alarm, allowing care staff to respond rapidly to potentially life-threatening incidents.

The SENTRY system works whichever position the door is in; open or closed, and is hardwired by design to minimize the risk of wireless interference, providing the robustness and reliability demanded for an assistive clinical product within a life-critical system.

SENTRY Ligature Monitor Alarms for Mental Health Doors.

 

Early-warning indicators for proactive intervention

In challenging mental health environments, it is critical staff are aware of door ligature incidents. So, following feedback from our mental health care partners, we developed the next-generation ligature monitoring and reporting software to maximise the benefits of ligature monitor alarms, now known as the KOSMOS Smart Monitoring System.

Integrating seamlessly with our SENTRY full-door edge ligature alarm system, KOSMOS provides enhanced visibility of all ligature monitor alarms present on a ward, with the unique ability of identifying and alerting care teams to early-warning indicators that a ligature attempt might be about to occur.

These early-warning indicators introduce proactive monitoring into mental healthcare environments for the first time, helping clinical teams to identify signs of patient distress, such as tampering with the door or increased activity in and out of a room, in order to check-in proactively with the patient before an incident takes placeMore information on KOSMOS can be found here.

 

Enhanced reporting and data analytics

In addition to helping clinical teams in live ward environments, KOSMOS also supports management and leadership teams responsible for operating mental healthcare facilities, providing a complete audit trail of secure data accessible via the KOSMOS Cloud.

With a time-stamped history of alarm activations, alarm tests, staff observations and more, KOSMOS provides a wealth of data points to support management teams in reviewing patient care quality, identifying key trends on wards, and demonstrating due diligence in incident reports.

KOSMOS Cloud: Ligature Monitoring for Mental Health Care.
Join us for an online Lunch & Learn: Designing Recovery

Join us on Thursday, 13th February for our first online Lunch & Learn event of 2025, featuring special guest speaker, Craig Wallace. Craig’s 35 year personal mental health journey has involved a lot of thinking about what works best in many settings to optimise mental health, including inpatient environments, thinking which he will share with us during the Lunch & Learn event, titled Designing Recovery.

More info | Register here!

 

Online Lunch & Learn Event: Designing Recovery in Mental Health. Thursday 13th February 2025.

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