Mixed Sex Wards and Labour's broken promises

Do you remember Tony Blair saying, whilst leader of the opposition, regarding mixed sex wards in hospitals ""Is it beyond the collective wit of the Government to deal with that problem?". Maybe you remember the Labour party's promises, made at the 1997 election and repeated in 2001, to bring an end to male and female patients sharing facilities in NHS hospitals.

You will be staggered to read here and here that the "Department of Health disclosed that eliminating mixed-sex wards is no longer an aim. A DoH spokesman said: "We have to get away from this idea of single-sex wards. That is not what it is all about. "Now we are in a situation where we are moving away from a set target on single-sex accommodation and moving towards the NHS locally taking privacy and dignity much more seriously. "It is possible to envisage patient privacy and dignity with patients of different sexes on the same wards but with proper segregation. "There are different ways of ensuring that. It's not about targets. Now it's much more about what the patient feels." The spokesman said a mixed ward divided into bays by fixed partitions - not necessarily fixed to the ceiling, but high enough that patients perceive they are in a separate room - counted as single-sex accommodation."

This government is duplicitous and incompetent.


"Andrew Lansley, the shadow health secretary, said: "After 10 years of failing to deliver, Labour now appear willing to betray the interests of patients by dropping their manifesto commitment to abolish mixed-sex wards as patients understand them. "As recently as last May, Patricia Hewitt made it clear that what she meant by single-sex accommodation excluded partitioned bays. "Now it seems the department are accepting the proposition that patients should be in mixed-sex accommodation with nothing but flimsy partitions between them. "Tony Blair said it couldn't be beyond the wit of Government to sort it out, but it is clearly beyond the competence of Labour." In May, Patricia Hewitt, the then Health Secretary, vowed there was more to be done to "meet our commitment to eliminate mixed-sex wards". Miss Hewitt stated two years ago that partitioned bays were "not good enough". The figures obtained by the Conservatives showed 31 per cent of the trusts admitted still having fully mixed wards - without any form of partition and excluding intensive care, emergency and children's wards. Some 26 per cent of trusts reported washing facilities were not segregated on all wards, while 29 per cent said lavatories were not fully segregated." In 1997, Labour swept to power promising to "work towards the elimination of mixed-sex wards" which appeared to characterise the lack of dignity afforded to NHS patients following years of Conservative cost-cutting. However, during Mr Blair's first term in office, he failed to end the problem and in 2001 Labour was forced to promise in its manifesto that it would end the wards by 2004.
Ministers missed at least three self-imposed deadlines. A succession of surveys demonstrated that government claims that only a tiny minority of wards treated both men and women after 2004 did not stand up to scrutiny. The commitment was dropped from the 2005 manifesto but ministers still claimed that mixed-sex wards would become a thing of the past. Often they quibbled over the definition of a mixed-sex ward and found themselves hammered by opposition parties and charities. Now more than ten years of political rhetoric and pledges were apparently abandoned with health officials declaring: "We have to get away from this idea of single sex wards.
"It is possible to envisage patient privacy and dignity with patients of different sexes on the same wards.""

Don't laugh, people voted for these knaves - more worryingly some will again and again.