6(B)(vi). Prague Bohnice Psychiatric Hospital
The monitoring team was informed that there was one remaining cage bed in the female long-term care unit (Ward 16) for a specific patient: a woman with an intellectual disability for whom the hospital is her (completely inappropriate) home. The woman’s parents had lobbied the hospital to retain “her” cage bed because they feared she would otherwise be strapped. Staff told MDAC that the woman had lived in the hospital for several years and had “behavioural problems,” was often “restless” and “attacks other patients.” She was put in the cage bed every day, but the netting of the bed was not closed the whole time.
The cage bed was situated in a regular room with three normal hospital beds and was used by the woman as a regular, everyday bed. Staff said she was not chemically restrained, but was sometimes given sleeping pills. The room was not locked from the outside and there was a window in the door to enable staff to monitor her when in the cage bed (also other patients could see her). Staff told the monitoring team that she just played with her toys in the cage bed. Every two hours, a nurse took her out to the toilet. Food was brought to her in the room when she was locked in the cage bed.
The monitoring team were told that the woman was not in the cage bed at the time of their visit, but rather in the nurses’ room, because nurses had informed her about their arrival in advance and she had, apparently, became agitated. Nurses asked the monitoring team to leave the ward so that they could place the woman back in the cage bed. The monitoring team learned that the woman was under the guardianship of one of her parents, so the hospital was acceding to a legal guardian’s request to use a cage bed. Her case makes clear the causal link between deprivation of legal capacity and further abuses such as institutionalisation and caging, a point which has also been made by the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture: “Fully respecting each person’s legal capacity is a first step in the prevention of torture and ill-treatment”.70
70 Juan E. Méndez, Report of the Special Rapporteur on torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, supra note 14 at p. 15.