To think mixed sex adult wards should be banned

[roarfeckingroarr]

Please could someone in the NHS or otherwise explain why women are expected to sleep in the same room and share bathrooms with strange men they don't know while at their most vulnerable?

Is it all just down to cost / overwhelmed services or is this an intentional policy?

This is on the bank of the thread with the poor woman whose 16 year old daughter was on a ward with adult men, some drunk.

Don't get me started on men staying all night in the postnatal wards.

Completely agree, I really felt for that girl and her mum, entirely inappropriate.

Youre lucky to feel that way. But maybe you are privileged enough never to have been the victim of male violence, abuse, assault or rape. Imagine how terrified those women will be at night surrounded by strange men in a hospital ward.

The NHS is a million miles away from being the best in the world bar none, but it is a sacred idol in the UK and must never be criticised, the idea that it is free has allowed a culture around it to develop whereby one must cravenly just put up and shut up.

It is NOT free, it is free at the point of use but it is paid for out of taxes and NO it's failings should not be cravenly accepted the NHS's role is to serve the patients not the other way round.

Mixed sex accommodation is banned. […] Accommodation must be single sex with single sex lavatory and bathing facilities accessible without going through the accommodation of the opposite sex.

None of which is much comfort when you're on a mixed psychiatric ward with

• no locks on any doors except the loos/bathrooms/nurses' office/door locking you in with all the unwell, unpredictable men, some of whom have lost their usual inhibitions
• plenty of out-of-the-way corners
• and a staff which consists of a boss nurse who hides in their office, a bank nurse who doesn't know the ward and hides in there with them, an HCA who's lackadaisically specialling someone, and another HCA who somehow always manages to be out of the thick of it.

Agreed. I hated being in hospital giving birth. The prenatal ward had a man with his partner until late at night, simply because she wanted him there.

Post birth baby wanted boob constantly and I couldn't stay covered well as post c-section. The curtains were never closed properly with nurses in and out and whole families running around.

The previous time I was in hospital I set off just in a towel for the shower an hour before visiting hour started to be met by a man waltzing in to see his partner.

At least all I felt was discomfort.

A family friend was on a mixed mental health unit. She was raped, consented but on a section with no capacity and never would have if not ill. Then badly beaten by a man (black and blue, teeth knocked out) 😓😓

Personally I think 100% single sex wards.

Or if its life and death and has to be mixed, move the nurses station in there and keep it supervised.

Those in the field talking about beds. Whatever happened to the empty wards talked about years ago that were unused due to lack of nursing staff. Couldn't those be used to segregate?

I don't care about mixed sexed wards- but bays need to be single sex (with the exception of ICU)

It's not the same bloody room! That's against CQC. It's side bays, single sex

Why oh why does this get trotted out every time that something goes wrong with the NHS. The research shows that the more nurses who have a degree, the safer care is because nursing has changed from doing what the doctor says to managing highly complex patients (who are much more complex than they were even 10 years ago, never mind in the 1940s).

Is it just nurses that shouldn't have degrees? Or all the professions that provide care in the NHS.

And btw, of course there are issues in the NHS and providing the volume and complexity of care that it was probably never designed for, but let's not pretend it was because they don't have matrons (they do) and that it's because nurses are now trained to degree level 🙄.

I agree with you OP.
100%

I’m a doctor, in my experience the most important thing for a patient with a problem needing specialist medical and nursing care , the most important thing is to have care from the right team. Single sex bays and single rooms can be achieved on a mixed specialist ward.
The bed numbers for each specialty are not enough for two wards any more with short stay pathways.

In other cases such as general medicine and Geriatrics , single sex wards are possible most of the time but as someone else said, having male and female bays on a ward allows hospitals to flex capacity better.

In my specialty, patient care is better for those patients looked after by nurses experienced in that specialty with therapists located on the ward. We see far more problems with ‘outliers’ lacking specialty input.

I’d rather have the best care than worry that there is a man in another room in the same clinical area who might see me going to the bathroom.

I was in hospital once…. And was put on the mens ward

they said me being in it made it now “mixed ward” the end

me and my arse hanging out of my gown (pre-op) in a room with 7 men who were all grim and snoring and scratching themselves and sniffing all day

it was sooooo grim. I was half naked (stupid gown) and felt so vulnerable and scared

i discharged myself and vowed only to ever set foot in hospital if I was so bad I’d have to be carried in.

my mum lived by a “avoid all doctors” rule, and lived well into her eighties. I can see why now.

I never understand why the British rave about the nhs, it is so sub-standard

I agree with you they should be banned.

Out of consideration for the men as well as the safety of women. My brother is currently on a mixed ward. He is immobile due to an accident. He has a bottle to piss in and he had to do this in front of a female patient. The NHS has been in crisis for a long time and cannot possibly manage single sex wards. People are shoved in wherever. Corridors, swab rooms, trolleys etc. It’s shocking.

He is no risk to any female patients but he is extremely tall and big and some females must feel quite nervous of him.

That might work with wards for some more serious physical conditions where people are expected to more or less stay where their bed is, but with psych wards, patients are expected to spend most of their non-sleeping time in mixed communal areas, because apparently being pushed to leave your sleeping area where you have at least a little privacy, and spend 16h a day mooching around in the vicinity of a dozen other acutely ill and extremely distressed people who you don't know, who may be displaying highly aberrant and sometimes dangerous behaviour, is somehow therapeutic. According to some theories, the mixed-sex environment is essential to allow a social environment representative of the outside world, as part of rehabilitation. Ha… How you're meant to do that when MH wards now only hold the most severely mentally ill, rather than the broader range of severities that used to be in mental hospitals, and when there is very little attempt at provision of therapeutic, occupational or social activities, I have no idea. It's not something that's relevant to the purpose of most present-day psych wards, which is to lock you up somewhere until the drugs kick in.

This.

Absolutely sick of the crap women and girls are expected to put up with.

you're lucky to get a bed or even seen at all. Until you've been in there and seen it for yourself you need to be grateful that we have an NHS!

Bingo!

@olympicsrock your own room? Is that your experience? Or a dream 😁

I was in 1 small hot room with 7 men, nobody bothered with curtains.

your own room…. Yeah right

@FFurryDandelionSeekingMissile I've had 6 psych admissions and spent over 6 months in 3 different wards all mixed sex

1. Matrons veryuch sitll exist
2. Feel free to go and get your treatment in countries where nurses don't need degrees.

Yes, I've never been in a single-sex psych ward. My first stint on a mixed adult ward was at 16. Although things can still happen on a single sex ward, there are some experiences I would rather not have had, which wouldn't have happened on a single sex ward.

They can claim "single sex accommodation" all they want, but all it means is no actual mixed dorms, and that there are women's bathrooms and loos next to the women's sleeping area (and same with men's). You're still locked in a small area of a building with disinhibited, scared, angry, withdrawing, confused men, who are physically well and retain all their physical strength. Many of whom are lovely people, but they're not any less likely to be dangerous than any other men.

The psych wards I've been in (in the UK in the last 2 years) were all indival rooms with ensuites- if for safety the ensuite needed to be locked then staff would supervise toileting. They also all had locks on the doors (and this is all NHS wards)

I first started being an inpatient regularly at age 14. Here it meant I was too old for children's and had to go to the main hospital.

The main hospital was still running with victorian wards of approx 32 beds. Wards were meant to be segregated by sex but more than often weren't.

As I was so young and kept being put in a men's ward, the nurses were kind and moved my bed into their station overnight, or a back office. Or on more than one occasion a big cupboard with a massive box labelled "shrouds" ....that kept me up more than the men.

I'm now in my early forties and not much has changed except we now have the new ward and bay system-- but often due to beds I have been admitted to the men's bay or the men to the womens.

I was in for 2 weeks at the end of October. There were 2 men in the 6 bed bay. It didn't bother me at all. 1 was very nice, the other had dementia but he told beautiful stories.
However, the lady beside me was Muslim and couldn't pull back her curtains and let these men see her as she explained to me she was not dressed in a way she could see men who were not her family members. So she sat surrounded by a blue curtain all day and I was 3/4 surrounded by a curtain too.

I've been in hospitals far too many times to count and for most stays the ward and bays have been mixed even for part of the stay.
I suppose I'm lucky that I have no issues with men, have never been abused and have had too many medical procedures to have any hospital 'shame' left.

But its farcical to try and pretend it doesn't happen, and until single bed spaces are offered there is not much we can do about it.

I haven't been in one in the last two years, though I'm aware the newer hospitals tend to have individual ensuite rooms. I've never been in a hospital where patients were able or allowed to lock their rooms (where individual rooms were available), but then I've always been in older facilities. Regardless of the sleeping arrangements, patients will still mostly be encouraged to spend as much time as possible in communal areas where patients are mixed. I feel there would have likely been fewer stabbings and genital exposures in those communal areas on a women-only ward.

Women's health, our needs & safety are of little interest to the NHS. Just look at the disgraceful state of maternity care with formal enquiries into maternal and baby deaths in countless hospitals. Racism runs unchecked with Black women 4 times more likely to die in childbirth. Countless hours & £££ spent by NHS staff in removing the language relating to women's bodies and health and replacing it with incomprehensible drivel in the interests of excluding women inclusion. Some Trusts actually have policies for wedging male born sex offenders on women's wards with staff in one hospital lying to the police that the rape of a woman on one of their supposedly single-sex wards by a trans patient “could not have happened” as there was “no male” at the scene. (google to confirm this unbelievable story).

Just as the police are having to face a massive loss of confidence from the public because of their repeated failure to prioritise crimes that affect the safety of the public, so the NHS is having to face the consequences for allowing itself to be diverted from providing safe respectful care to women (and men) and indulging in ideological nonsense. The explanations about lack of funding, staff and stress only go so far when you look at what the NHS is choosing to prioritise.

My 86 year old mother was put into a mixed ward back in 1997. It was an open oncology ward, no bays. 12 beds with 6 beds on each side. The three men were kept together at the end of the ward, two of them were respectful and kept themselves to themselves. The third one was elderly and confused, prone to verbal aggression and wandered about the ward. My mother was really distressed one day when I visited her, she had to use a commode with the curtains pulled around her bed. This man opened the curtains while she was being assisted off the commode by a nurse. He nightynwas up around her waist, bless her, she said the only man whose ever seen my fanny was your dad!
She hated being on that ward.