For every 1,000 hours that psychiatric patients spent at a rural North Carolina hospital from July 1 through December 31, 2013, more than 800 of those hours were spent in some kind of physical restraint.
That works out to being restrained, frequently with one's arms and legs bound, for more than 3 days out of 4. It's also more than six times the rate of the hospital with the next highest restraint rate, and more than 800 times the national average, which is less than an hour of restraint out of every 1,000, according to an analysis of the most recent figures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).
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