This article analyses the Final Report on the Disability Royal Commission with a focus on the recommendations relating to restrictive practices. 

Many people with disability and advocates have looked to the Disability Royal Commission (DRC) for a clear direction on eliminating restrictive practices. 

Restrictive practices are anything that ‘has the effect of restricting the rights or freedom of movement of a person with disability.’ This overwhelmingly happens to people with an intellectual disability, autistic people and people with psychosocial disability. They happen at school, at home, in disability providers, in prison, in hospitals. 

The Disability Royal Commission heard evidence of a range of violence against people with disability such as support staff turning power off from an electric wheelchair, sedating people with huge doses of medication, and the involuntary sterilisation of men and women for ‘convenience’. The same paper found that First Nations people with disability experience more of this kind of abuse. 

DRC recommendations for restrictive practices
So what has the Royal Commission said should happen in Volume 6 (Enabling autonomy and access) ? 

• Recommendation 6.35 outlines what the DRC believes should be the ‘legal frameworks for the authorisation, review and oversight of restrictive practices’.  
• Recommendation 6.36 talks about immediately stopping certain restrictive practices.  
• Recommendation 6.37 is about collecting more data and public reporting on psychotropic medication.  
• Recommendation 6.38 says there needs to be strengthening of the evidence base on reducing and eliminating restrictive practices.  
• Recommendation 6.39 is about improving collection and reporting of restrictive practices data.  
• Recommendation 6.40 calls for targets and performance indicators to drive the reduction and elimination of restrictive practices as though this will help.  
• Recommendation 6.41 asks for the legislative prohibition of non-therapeutic sterilisation.