Safe Chargers
A common policy among psychiatric wards is that at-risk patients must hand over any chargers. The reason usually given is that the long cables can be used for self-strangulation.
The patient must then surrender their device to the nurses' station for charging, which creates an unhealthy power dynamic as the nurse now controls their access to the outside world.
If an implicit motivation for this is to protect them from their actions, then it needs to be made explicit and recorded as a restrictive practice. Their phones are their lifelines to support and reassurance, and contacting the outside world is the primary method of holding staff accountable. Controlling access to them is a very serious act.
Regardless of how realistic the fear of strangulation is (or isn't), we can obviate it entirely.
(Above image is broadly representative of the type of thing, but not the exact items)
We are starting a pilot program to provide appropriately certified (SAA RCM) and professionally tested/tagged (AS/NZS 3760) chargers with extremely short cables to psychiatric wards which cannot be used as any kind of ligature. This includes USB-C, USB-Micro, Lightning and 30 Pin. We are discussing getting an electrical engineer to do a full teardown and report.
They may still pose a choking hazard. That is effectively impossible to avoid — it applies to almost any small object. But we haven't figured out a way you could make a noose with these. If there is a genuine concern we will investigate permanently attaching the short cables.
If you are an inpatient, consumer advocate, or anyone working for a hospital who can organise for these to be distributed, please contact us.
While we can order in bulk to get reasonable prices, we are constrained by our resources which are entirely donated.