32 ANNUAL REPORT 2017 RESIDENT SAFETY OVERLOOKED Ole is not interested in talking with us, but his fellow residents tell us that he sometimes has outbursts with him shouting, behaving in a threatening way and smashing things to pieces. This makes them feel unsafe. Another resident, who is called Pia, tells us about an incident when Ole wreaked havoc in the community room and knocked things down from the dining table. This incident has made Pia afraid of Ole. Pia tells us that she now goes into her own room to eat even though she really prefers to sit in the community room with the other residents. Late in the day, we speak with management, and we make a number of recommendations based on what we have seen and heard throughout the day. Among other things, we suggest that management draw up a policy on how to prevent, handle and follow up on violence, threats and other incidents which cause feelings of unsafety, just like the anti-violence policy for staff that is already in place. The management agree that when an anti-violence policy for staff exists, there ought to be one for residents too, of course. The reaction is quite typical of our visits to residential facilities in 2017: there is agreement that residents’ perspective may have been overlooked in the efforts to improve the safety of staff. Through recent years, a number of tragic deaths have taken place: staff have been attacked by residents at social psychiatric residential facilities throughout the country. The attacks have attracted great attention, and in the wake of the debate, staff safety has been improved. For example, the Danish Working Environment Authority issued improvement notices in 2016 to many institutions in the social psychiatric sector, requiring among other things that knives were not to be freely accessible at residential facilities, that staff must carry personal attack alarms and that staff were not to work on their own. T H E P SYC H I AT R I C SYS T E M – H  ospitals (open and closed general psychiatric wards and closed forensic psychiatric wards): examination, diagnosis and treatment. – Community mental healthcare sector: psychiatric treatment on an outpatient basis. – S  ocial psychiatric sector: all kinds of everyday support other than medical treatment to citizens with mental health issues. Includes residential facilities, drop-in centres and sup­ port person programmes. It is the municipality’s responsibility to provide social psychia­ tric programmes, either its own programmes or in cooperation with other municipalities or regions or private programmes (cf. section 4(1) and (2) of the Social Services Act).