Residents at 10% of the Netherlands’ 300 nursing homes developed bruising and other injuries from being tied to their chair or beds in 2005, according to health inspectors figures published in today’s Volkskrant.

The paper says all nursing homes use restraints to tie down residents, mainly elderly people, to stop them wandering off and falling down.
The figures indicate that nursing homes made some 20,000 mistakes with medicine in 2005, largely by forgetting to give people drugs or giving them the wrong dose.
The nursing home Lisidunahof in Leusden tops the list with 921 incidents, says the Volkskrant. But the institute’s director Hans de Quartel tells the paper that the statistics give a distorted picture because his organisation registered every single mistake, however small.
The institutions involved say the situation has improved in the last two years.