MONITORING ACTIVITIES 31 Erik Dorph Sørensen Deputy Head of Department Katrine Rosenkrantz de Lasson Legal Case Officer On a day in the spring of 2017, a small team from the Ombudsman’s office are on a monitoring visit to a residential facility on the outskirts of a Danish provincial town. The facility consists of separate houses with individual flats for the residents and a shared community room with a kitchen, television and sofa corner. During our tour of one of the houses, we run into a large man with a beard. He is standing in the middle of the floor in the community room, shouting angrily. We have to get quite close to the man in order to pass. Even though his anger is probably not directed towards us, he still seems scary to the whole team. The man with the beard is called Ole. We have read about him beforehand in the material we always ask for prior to a monitoring visit. In the material, he is described as temperamental. Ole is 61 years old and has been living at the facility for almost three years because he needs extensive daily support. He is an alcohol abuser, has a record of violence and threats, and over a number of years he has regularly been hospitalised in psychiatric wards. In that way, Ole is similar to many other residents at the country’s social psychiatric residential facilities. At Ole’s facility, all residents have a psychiatric diagnosis, and almost a quarter of the residents have a hospital order. T H E OM B U DSM A N ’ S M O N I TO R I N G V I S I T S – M  onitoring visits are an important task for the Ombudsman. Besides handling complaints and taking up cases on his own initiative, the Ombudsman carries out approximately 50 monitoring visits each year. – T  he Ombudsman’s visiting teams visit public and private institutions, especially institutions where persons are or may be deprived of their liberty, for instance prisons, social care insti­ tutions and psychiatric wards. – T  he objective of the monitoring visits is to contribute to ensuring that persons who are staying or living at institutions are treated with dignity and care and in accordance with their rights.