Hospital Wards: Gender

(asked on 29th June 2017) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what his policy is on the use of mixed-sex wards in the NHS.


Answered by
Philip Dunne Portrait
Philip Dunne
This question was answered on 4th July 2017

All patients deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. The Government has made it clear that providers of National Health Service-funded care are expected to eliminate mixed-sex accommodation, except where this is in the overall best interest of the patient, or reflects their personal choice.

Any hospital that places patients in mixed-sex accommodation can face fines of £250 per patient, per day.

The NHS Constitution (first published in March 2012) introduced a pledge under “Respect, consent and confidentiality”:

- “that if you are admitted to hospital, you will not have to share sleeping accommodation with patients of the opposite sex, except where appropriate, in line with the details set out in the handbook to the NHS Constitution”

In December 2010, the national reporting of breaches in relation to sleeping accommodation commenced and is collected monthly from all NHS providers and organisations that provide NHS-funded care (including Independent and Voluntary Sector organisations). From April 2011 the collection became mandatory.

Delivering zero breaches for every trust, every month, is unlikely. This is because it is occasionally right to mix patients (e.g. if a patient is admitted in the middle of the night and the only way to release an appropriate bed would be to awaken and move other patients). In such cases, the breach should be rectified as soon as possible.

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