58 npm annual report 2016 /observations and recommendations 3.10 Health care In the health care sector, the accurate number of those health care units that fall within the NPM’s mandate is not available. A request for information has been submitted to the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health by the Office of the Parliamentary Ombudsman. The Ministry has been requested to submit to the Ombudsman a list of 1) units providing psychiatric special care, 2) secure rooms in the operating units of somatic health care, and 3) other health care operating units where people deprived of their liberty are or may be held. The processing of this request for information has not yet been completed at the Office of the Parliamentary OmbudsOld medicine bottles in the Pitkäniemi Hospital man. Museum. In early 2016, the media spread news of serious abuses uncovered in the closed psychiatric wards of Turku City Hospital. According to the newspaper report, patients had been humiliated, assaulted and drugged senseless. In February, the National Supervisory Authority for Welfare and Health (Valvira) initiated an own-initiative investigation to verify if Kupittaa Psychiatric Hospital was operating appropriately. It soon turned out that the incidents aired in public mainly had taken place in a single geriatric psychiatry ward at City of Turku’s Kupittaa Psychiatric Hospital in 2013. Valvira together with AVI Southwestern Finland conducted two inspections in this ward. The second inspection also extended to other wards. The Ombudsman monitored the investigation, and the decision issued by Valvira on 15 June 2016 and the inspection reports were forwarded to him. In its decision, Valvira noted that placing acute psychiatric patients in single rooms reduced the incidence of violence and the need for coercive measures, as well as accelerating patients’ recovery. The general objective should be placing these patients in single rooms. As a consequence of this incident, the Ombudsman felt there was a particular need to focus on geriatric psychiatry wards on visits to operating units of the health care system. While a geriatric psychiatry unit might not provide involuntary treatment referred to in the Mental Health Act it may, for example, find it necessary to restrict a patient’s freedom of movement in a manner that falls within the NPM’s mandate. In the spring, the NPM visited the neuropsychiatry and geriatric psychiatry wards of the City of Tampere’s Hatanpää Hospital and Pirkanmaa Hospital District’s Pitkäniemi Hospital. A consultant psychiatrist participated in these visits as an external expert. Hearing patients with memory disorders is challenging, and it is usually not possible to obtain sufficient information on such questions as the patients’ treatment this way. Consequently, the visits were pre-announced; the units were asked to inform the patients’ family and friends of the visit and this opportunity to come and discuss their experiences of their family members’ treatment and care with the NPM.