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In the Netherlands, as in England, concerns exist about the extent of and frequency with which freedom-restricting measures are applied. The view is that use of these measures needs to decrease. The purpose of this paper is to outline new legislation that is expected to come into force in the Netherlands in 2020.

This paper provides a description of legislation entering into force on 1 January 2020.

Many of the new legislation’s practical implications remain unclear, including the definition of involuntary care.

The new legislation will start being monitored directly after coming into force, and only then the authors will make out what works well and what does not.

Introducing new legislation on coercion is not sufficient. Careful implementation of the legislation is important, including the way it defines involuntary care.

In 2020, the Netherlands is introducing new legislation on involuntary care for people with an intellectual disability. This includes a definition of involuntary care.

The purpose of this paper is to advance a number of outlooks on the reporting of the use of coercive measures in the care for persons with intellectual disabilities. The following questions will be discussed: which forms of involuntary care should be externally reported and how is this external reporting influenced by environmental and other factors?

This paper describes an important part of the New Dutch Care and Coercion Act (Wet zorg en dwang) concerning reporting the use of coercive measures. The implications of reporting the use of coercive measures have been discussed at a meeting for experts in mental health law and the care of people with an intellectual disability. The issue has been presented to the participants as neutrally as possible, so as to provide the researchers a comprehensive picture of the different views on reporting the use of coercive measures. The outcome of this meeting has served as the input for a further step in the research – using the Delphi method – in order to address the issue comprehensively.

The Dutch legislation on reporting involuntary care implies that measures carried out only in the face of resistance should be externally reported. The experts that participated in this study endorse the importance of a real-time external reporting system. They believe that standardized and reliable external reporting requires involuntary care, the categories of involuntary care and the environmental and other factors that affect external reporting to be defined more concretely. They regard environmental and other factors as decisive for assessing whether a measure constitutes involuntary care. This in turn, therefore, has consequences for whether such incidents should be reported.

Many concepts in the new Dutch Care and Coercion Act (Wet zorg en dwang) are not formally defined. Instead, the legislator has left it to those in the field to decide how they should be interpreted. This prompted many questions from those attending the expert meeting and in our own analysis. The researchers could possibly have resolved this confusion during the meeting by formulating more detailed definitions of terms such as “resistance” and “involuntary care” beforehand. The disadvantage of this, however, would have been that those attending the meeting would have had no opportunity to define the terms on the basis of their own expertise. As a result, the researchers have obtained all relevant information comprehensively to use as the input for the next step of the research, which employs the Delphi method.

This viewpoint emphasises the need to take a wide range of factors into account throughout the process in order to establish whether care can be seen as involuntary. The researchers regard the care providers’ expertise in dealing with these factors – client factors, and behavioural or environmental factors, for example – as being of essential importance if care is to be recognised as involuntary and reported as effectively as possible. Therefore, the researchers discuss whether the legal position of clients is protected if care providers register only those forms of involuntary care where there is obvious resistance. In this case, many forms of resistance are overlooked, which may be to the detriment of the legal protection of clients with intellectual disabilities. However, the system in the UK shows that it can be quite complicated to develop a clear definition of involuntary care that is usable in practice, without giving rise to an enormous amount of bureaucracy and thus distracting from the real issue: protecting the legal position of clients with an intellectual disability.

Academic papers clearly demonstrate that external reporting of involuntary care has not yet become properly established, either in the Netherlands or elsewhere, such as in the UK. This paper seeks to provide insights into new Dutch legislation about external reporting of involuntary care. By organising a meeting with experts, the factors that have so far acted as obstacles in the reporting of involuntary care are problematized. The findings of this paper will help to further the process of developing an effective system for reporting involuntary care.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the functionality of the particular epistemological schools with regard to the issues of users with visual impairment, to offer a theoretical answer to the question why these issues are not in the center of the interest of information science, and to try to find an epistemological approach that has ambitions to create the theoretical basis for the analysis of the relationship between information and visually impaired users.

The methodological basis of the paper is determined by the selection of the epistemological approach. In order to think about the concept of information and to put it in relation to issues associated with users with visual impairment, a conceptual analysis is applied.

Most of information science theories are based on empiricism and rationalism; this is the reason for their low interest in the questions of visually impaired users. Users with visual disabilities are out of the interest of rationalistic epistemology because it underestimates sensory perception; empiricism is not interested in them paradoxically because it overestimates sensory perception. Realism which fairly reflects such issues is an approach which allows the providing of information to persons with visual disabilities to be dealt with properly.

The paper has a speculative character. Its findings should be supported by empirical research in the future.

Theoretical questions solved in the paper come from the practice of providing information to visually impaired users. Because practice has an influence on theory and vice versa, the author hopes that the findings included in the paper can serve to improve practice in the field.

The paper provides theoretical anchoring of the issues which are related to the inclusion of people with disabilities into society and its findings have a potential to support such efforts.

This is first study linking questions of users with visual disabilities to highly abstract issues connected to the concept of information.