The Mental Health Commission has found the inpatient mental health facility at University Hospital Waterford has been critically non-compliant with regulations in two areas; maintenance of records and the use of seclusion.
Last July, the commission's inspectors found that a dirty and dusty seclusion room was being used at the centre and gave the facility a "high risk" rating for its standards of privacy, premises, staffing and registration, and where the admission of children was concerned.
There is also criticism of the management of three voluntary patients who had each been placed in seclusion at some stage.
The report states that in all three episodes, seclusion was only implemented in the resident's best interests, in rare and exceptional circumstances where the resident posed an immediate and serious harm to him or herself or others.
This was the fourth successive year that the same centre wasn't compliant with the rule of seclusion.
Another area scrutinised was when it came to clinical files, and it found that "clinical files were in very poor order," the report says, citing "potential confidentiality breaches" where files were not stored securely.
Overall, discharge planning and procedures were judged "unsatisfactory, in particular the issuing of discharge letters to GPs".
