"Solitary confinement and restraint are practices to be used as a last resort. They may only be used to prevent immediate or imminent damage to the patient or another person, on the decision of a psychiatrist, and for a limited period. Their use must be subject to strict surveillance, entrusted by the institution to he alth professionals designated for this purpose. "A record must be kept in each authorised psychiatric health institution appointed by the Director General of the Regional Health Service (ARS) to ensure psychiatric treatment without consent pursuant to sub -section I, Article l.3222-1. For each solitary confinement or restraint measure, this record mentions the name of the psychiatrist who decided to take this measure, the date and time, its duration and the name of the health professionals who monitored the patient during this time. The record, which can be digital, must be presented, when requested, to the Département-level Commission for Psychiatric Care, the Contrôleur général des lieux de privation de liberté or its delegates and to members of Parliament. "The institution draws up an annual report giving a full account of the practices for admitting patients to seclusion rooms and for using restraint, the defined policy for limiting recourse to these practices and evaluation of their use. This report is submitted for the opinion of the Users' Committee provided for in Article L. 1112 -3 and of the Monitoring Committee provided for in Article L. 6143-1 ". During the visits conducted in the months following the adoption of these provisions, the CGLPL could not help but notice the scant measures in place to make sure the nursing staff were taking this rule on board and, consequently, the low number of institutions that had drawn up an official policy for limiting use of these practices and a procedure for assessing their use in practice. Even the first step towards a formal procedure – opening a record, the contents of which would at the very least be worth clarifying – only appeared to be in place in a handful of cases. Even when such records do exist, they are often difficult to process. For example, one of the records examined did not allow a clear distinction between solitary confinement for a few hours in a room specifically designated for that purpose, and the patient's own room; in another institution, although a solitary confinement and restraint record had been kept in the past, this was no longer the case since management of patients' records had become electronic; in other cases, solitary confinement was mainly practised in the patient's room with no traceability. Over the whole year the CGLPL only visited two institutions which ensured sufficient traceability of solitary confinement and restraint measures to find out the reasons, monitoring arrangements, renewal measures and measures taken to bring these situations to an end. In other institutions, the CGLPL found that, owing to the medical training of the staff or to local tradition, solitary confinement and restraint was not often practised – with no apparent adverse consequences. For all that, even in those institutions adopting these measured practices, traceability is not systematic – such that the inspectors have had to base their conclusions on the accounts of the medical staff and sometimes, even, of the patients. The visits conducted also confirmed the criticism expressed in the May 2016 thematic report on the accommodation conditions of patients placed in solitary confinement. Rooms were observed that fell well short of the expected standards and posed grave safety concerns such as accessible lighting fixtures, protruding tap fittings or a defective call system. There is evidence of situations in which patients have been confined in their own room with no monitoring measures or suitable equipment, their rooms lacking any washing facilities and located a long way from the nursing staff's office – and even places laid out in such a way that they bring to mind the solitary confinement wing of certain prisons or custody cells. On a final note, in one institution the CGLPL saw that patients had been placed completely naked in seclusion rooms. 24