Mixed Sex Wards and Labour's broken promises (update)

I blogged back in December 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 being a total break with the Labour manifesto promises in 1997 and 2000 to eliminate mixed sex wards and also contrary to Patricia Hewitt's comments when she was still "in charge" of Health that partitioned bays were "not good enough".

Now I read on the BBC that "Lord Darzi said the government was committed to single-sex accommodation whereby wards are divided into male and female bays by fixed partitions... He said the goal was never to create single-sex wards as this was not achievable...A Department of Health spokesman said Lord Darzi's comments were "fully in line" with the government's "long-standing commitment on mixed-sex accommodation"...Ministers were insisting as recently as November 2006 that 99% of patients were being seen in single-sex accommodation."


More Labour broken promises, "quelle surprise".