Male hospital staff

[ToadRage]

I don't really know how i feel about this or if I'm just being a bit precious. I had an appointment for a transvaginal ultrasound a couple of weeks ago. I was a bit shocked to find the sonographer was a man. A female nurse was present and she did all the talking, he barely said a word to me. I have had ultrasounds before but they have always been done by women. He was professional and nothing out of the ordinary happened but I felt a bit awkward as I haven't had a man down there except my husband in 20+ years, not even a male doctor. Am I wrong in thinking I should have been told it was going to be done by a man, maybe given the option to request a woman or AIBU?

What sort of vetting would uncover a sex offender if they haven’t yet been convicted?

I didn’t suggest that recording the info would solve the problem but if you don’t understand the full extent of the problem, how can they start to address it in a meaningful way?

It wasn’t ’misrepresentation of the actual facts’. I pointed out that there are legal mechanisms with which to do this. The fact that the tribunal didn’t agree that it was lawful doesn’t mean a huge amount as it is not precedent setting. Afaik no higher court has yet been involved. .

if the NHS wanted to, I’m sure it could put together a meaningful appeal to demonstrate that it was justified for the purposes of providing the healthcare that I’m sure the majority of women want - I don’t see many women suggesting they would request a man, only that they ‘don’t care’ that it is a man and are prepared to take the risk that he’s not one if the several thousand staff accused of rape or sexual assault.

It's a simple way of saying that I think your comments are entirely unfounded, and I disagree.

Yes, its a man’s inalienable right to perform intimate procedures on women even if they are unwilling and/or traumatised. Anything else is bigotry. Women must reframe their trauma to accommodate the wants of men.

Hi Mridul, ICM5UKP!

By the way - sex offenders and other predators do get through background checks and not infrequently. NHS trusts have lied to cover up cases of women being raped and assaulted.

But you know all this, you just think mens rights are more important. <shrug>

I think you’ve misunderstood the concept of an inalienable right. Either that or you’re flippantly jumping to extremis to make a point as sensible reasoning is failing you.

I mean, even my discussion of vetting self evidently suggests those rights are not* inalienable…

When I 'look through the annals of history', nothing I see makes me think that we can trust men to treat women with dignity and respect, both inside and outside of the medical profession.

So I'm not sure that proves what the PP thinks it does...

@OtterlyAstounding having just seen this awful story, I can’t believe some people are still pushing for women to be educated to accept intimate care and procedures from men. There are too many bad apples for it to be acceptable. www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c86dy4e7zq5o

Yes its well documented that predators will go to extraordinary lengths to gain access to their targets. They will also go for the easiest targets.

Men trained as priests, social workers, teachers, took on youth groups to gain access. As churches started to take action and some areas of social work and education became more mindful predators moved to the charity sector. Its always been a problem in the media/creative professions where patronage is critical to career progress. The idea that predatory men won’t claim any identity/training they can to access their targets is for the birds - generations of history make that clear.

The NHS/Care industries have actively removed many protections from women over the past 15 years (including not completing full background checks) on the nonsensical assumption that men won’t lie. Trusts have then lied and covered up the consequences.

But yes, its women who need “re education” to address our wrongthink. Om forbid that men focus their efforts on addressing the behaviours of men rather than whining “NAMALT” and “Its not fair on the poor menz!!!”. Fix the behaviours of men and most of the barriers would disappear.

TW for the information in the BBC article below.

Yes, it’s interesting. I didn’t get an answer on which ‘annals of history’ were being referred to but PP seems VERY focused on the interests of men at the clear expense of women.

It occurred to me earlier that most of these changes have happened fairly recently. There traditionally have been male gynaecologists but as the majority of nurses are women and there was maybe an unspoken presumption to prioritise a female practitioner for intimate female procedures, being faced with an unexpected man in the clinic for most routine intimate procedures almost never came up as an issue for women.

Now, after the NHS and some nursing unions got it into their heads that somehow poor men must be missing out and decided to have a recruitment drive for men into traditionally female areas like midwifery/scans etc, more and more women are faced with this horrible situation. Also the push from the NHS and nursing unions of trans ideology means you can ask for a woman and STILL be faced with a man who claims he is a woman.

There has been no public consultation in this as far as I am aware, where women are asked how they feel about this whole situation (a proper consultation, not one designed for a specific outcome as we see with the trans lobby so frequently).

If such a consultation had been carried out, and proper attention given to the higher risk of death for women with a male surgeon, as well as the issues of women self excluding or being traumatised by men in these intimate situations. (This happened to a friend of mine), then the NHS might have put forward a decent defence and actually won the discrimination cases brought by men. Given the overall attitude of the NHS and many nursing unions towards women I’m not surprised they didn’t bother to challenge it and establish a legal precedent.

So now we are left with the women claiming “I don’t care” being listened to over the women who strongly object because nobody wants to say no to the men. Maybe we should say in the short term that all women who ‘don’t care’ get automatically allocated the men and free up the female staff so those of us who DO care can be guaranteed a woman. After all, we pay our taxes and NI and are 51% of the population.

As I said before, most decent men would not actively choose to go into medical care that involved intimate examinations or treatment of women as they know that most women will be distressed or uncomfortable. Is it just a wild coincidence that of 200 male midwives, at least 3 are now convicted as sex offenders? Or that the anaesthetist who orally raped an unconscious woman undergoing surgery was male?

The NHS seems to have quite a problem in dealing with bad behaviour from some of the men it employs.

Female surgeons say they are being sexually harassed, assaulted and in some cases raped by colleagues, a major analysis of NHS staff has found.
BBC News has spoken to women who were sexually assaulted in the operating theatre while surgery took place.

Sexual harassment, sexual assault and rape have been referred to as surgery's open secret.
There is an untold story of women being fondled inside their scrubs, of male surgeons wiping their brow on their breasts and men rubbing erections against female staff. Some have been offered career opportunities for sex.
The analysis - by the University of Exeter, the University of Surrey and the Working Party on Sexual Misconduct in Surgery - has been shared exclusively with BBC News.
Nearly two-thirds of women surgeons who responded to the researchers said they had been the target of sexual harassment and a third had been sexually assaulted by colleagues in the past five years.
Women say they fear reporting incidents will damage their careers and they lack confidence the NHS will take action.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-66775015?app-referrer=deep-link

Yes, it’s such an unbelievable attitude. Telling women they are ‘in safe hands’ when the crimes committed by male NHS staff show that no such guarantee can be made.

And bearing in mind the proven issues of NHS colleagues covering up terrible crimes committed against women by men (one recent situation of a young girl with serious m/h issues placed in a male psychiatric facility (because she ‘identified’ as male) and was raped within the hour. NHS staff then lied to police and withheld vital evidence to hamper the investigation. There have been other cases where staff have also lied to prevent police investigation into a rape.

When the hospital called me with my scan appointment they gave me a date and then said "oh that's a man, is that OK or would you rather a woman?". I picked the woman. It isn't a particularly pleasant procedure so why would you add embarrassment to it?

As it was, the woman hardly said a word to me and was really rough, so perhaps I'd have been better off with a man?

“Nothing”? Clearly you haven’t looked very hard.

Noting, you weren’t even looking for the right point in the first place 🙄

Historically speaking, men have not, on the whole, treated women well. In terms of medicine, they've often treated women very badly. Medicine has always been male dominated, and they've created a very male culture that doesn't always respect women's autonomy and dignity.

See, for instance, the issues in the past several decades of women having pelvic exams performed on them by trainees without their consent while they're under anaesthesia for surgery - sometimes surgeries that are entirely unrelated to the genitals.

So regardless of the point you might have been trying to make, you made a very different one than you intended - looking at the behaviour of men across history, including in recent history in medicine, a female HCP is, on balance, probably a better option than a male one.

My point was regarding treatment of an entire category of individuals based upon the actions of a limited few.

Not in relation to how either sex has treated one another.

How the male sex has treated the female sex, you mean. It's a one-way street, as the female sex has never been in a position to oppress or dehumanise males as a sex.

And I think how males have treated females in medicine - and other spheres of society - both now and historically, is probably more relevant to the topic at hand.

No, that’s not what I’m referring to. Your arrogance of telling me what I was referring to is bewildering.

Maybe if you just explained which historical annal you were referring to, we’d stop having to guess?

What were you referring to with that comment? - you obviously had something specific in mind.

I haven't told you that you referred to that.

In fact, I explicitly said: "So regardless of the point you might have been trying to make, you made a very different one than you intended"

I'm acknowledging you weren't referring to that, but that your mention of history and how groups of people treat other groups, made me think of how men have treated women historically and currently.

In spiked, sorry I can't link - you can read of Sweden's Elder Rape Scandal. The victims were elderly women, some demented, dependant on outside help for personal care. In all, 45 Councils across Sweden received complaints. Most of the attackers but not all were migrants; men whose criminal history cannot be checked.

Apparently, our male NHS staff need special training not to sexually harass women. And according to pp, male surgeons need to be trained better not to have pre conceived bias and better communication skills to reduce the female death rate when they operate on us.

Yet @ThreadGuardDog wants women to be re-educated, gaslit and told that we are ‘in safe hands’.

For context, male nurses are 11% of the nursing workforce.

The lack of sexual harassment training has resulted in more than 80% of all striking-off orders related to sexualy TT of the nursing workforce, male nurses account for 60-70% of reports or disciplinary action for sexual misconduct. Male perpetrators make up the vast majority of criminal convictions in nursing.

www.distilledpost.com/post/crossing-the-line-sexual-assault-cases-in-the-nhs-at-all-time-high

I had a very young male sew me up after giving birth, snd a male doing a trans vag scan, didn't think anything of it. You can refuse if it bothers you though.