Recent events around the country continue to place firefighter/paramedics in positions of having to defend themselves in criminal or civil courts after restraining combative patients. In one terrible predicament for firefighters, they found the local district attorney considering indicting them on murder charges after a patient in their care died after becoming combative and was restrained.

An unfortunate side of performing EMS in the streets is that restraining patients is sometimes necessary and essential for the safety of the firefighters, bystanders and even the patient. Although we all have been trained from the same textbooks and there is a standard of care that is followed in the development of those textbooks, the bottom line is that those textbooks cannot educate you on every situation you are going to encounter. This is especially true when encountering combative patients and there becomes a need for restraining them.

When performing emergency medicine in the streets, firefighters sometimes have limited resources, encounter more scene hazards, and are not as well-equipped as a hospital with diagnostic equipment to rule out non-life threatening causes of abnormal behavior. Restraining a patient takes into account that you have a duty to act and you are doing so legally because the patient has implied consent for treatment with abnormal behavior. Usually, we must restrain patients because there is a need to protect them from physically harming themselves deliberately or not deliberately, such as self-extubation. We also need to restrain a patient when you are protecting yourself, other firefighters, the patient's family and sometimes bystanders from violence brought on by the patient. Sometimes, there is a need to restrain disoriented or uncooperative patients so that they may be assessed, or to facilitate medically necessary procedures.

Many times when patients are combative, they are known to be in an agitated state known as agitated delirium or excited delirium. Usually, these states are associated with a metabolic cause such as low blood sugar, chemical imbalance, or the use of a stimulant such as cocaine, methamphetamines or PCP. These patients usually have increased exertion and an increase in oxygen demand.