Grennie longer term ward was geriatric, and I witnessed the appalling treatment meted out to older women there, all of whom counselled me to be quiet about it as they could suffer if I said anything. I’d already learnt it was likely to be true.
The situation wasn’t great on male bays, but indignities such as being left without closed curtains when examined, using bed pans, commodes or washing, seemed to be reserved for older women with the oldest getting it worst, and dementia suffers having no right to any privacy.
On that ward although some very nasty unrelated things eventually happened to me, I was considered ‘young enough’ as a female, to be automatically allowed my curtains properly closed without fuss or objection, but I repeatedly heard older women told no one was interested in looking at them, mainly from female staff.
Writer I don’t doubt that for a minute, and assume it is a horrible potential pitfall for female nurses with male patients, just as having some women refuse male nurses perform all nursing functions is theirs.
I can see that life for nurses and hcp's of either sex and different races is complicated and often difficult and potentially demeaning, and as Grennie says “the realities of the society we live in.”