Intimate care: consent should only count if it is given without coercion.

[RainWithSunnySpells]

A few days ago, I was shown a Telegraph article about Theresa Steele.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/06/teresa-steele-same-sex-care-denied-surgery-nhs-london-hca/

In the article, Theresa states that “it is particularly distressing to hear from disabled women, including a young woman who is paralysed and has been forced by a private agency to accept intimate care from men under threat of her care being withdrawn.”

Reading that quote was extremely distressing for me as I have previously needed intimate care following an accident. I have seen this subject discussed by some incerdibly inspirational people with long term disabilites. I would like to add a voice from the perspective of someone with an injury.

When I was hopitalised, I was in an extremely vulnerable state. I don't think that it is possible to realise what true vulnerability is until you are completely bed bound, unable to even roll off the bed and drag yourself away from danger. You might have a voice, but that is easy to subdue. It is hard to explain what being so vulnerable does to you as the days go by, how it eats away at your sanity, your self-worth and your ability to advocate for yourself. Your self-determination is all but gone. You are at the complete mercy of other people; people that you don't know.

I had to either be flat on my back or slightly rolled to the left or to the right and propped up with pillows. I couldn't be fully on my side. This slight rolling was also required to change the bedsheets. To change my position required a team of at least three people who 'log rolled' me. I was allowed to have my legs flat or slightly bent at the knee with a thin pillow under my knees. To do this, or to put my legs flat again required a nurse.

I had a catheter, but a bed pan was required for bowel movements. This required a nurse, and they had to wipe me as I couldn't do it. I also couldn't change sanitary products or bathe myself. I could barely brush my teeth, even with help. Even holding a book to read was too painful after a few minutes.

I could discuss specific incidents that happened during this time, but in a way they don't matter. All that matters is that having been in this situation, I am completely convinced that single-sex care should be available to anyone who might need it. I know how easy it is to coerce someone when they are at their most vulnerable. This must not happen, in fact it must be actively guarded against.

People need to be asked if they want single-sex care without pressure (no asking with opposite sex carers standing over you, waiting for your permission). People need to have time to think about it and not be put on the spot. They must not be told that all their care can be withdrawn if they don't agree. They also need to know that they can change their mind. What you think you can cope with and what you can actually cope with aren't always that same thing.

We are all one fall from a ladder, one car crash or one bad slip in the rain away from this situation. The option of same-sex intimate care must always be available to those that require it.

Fully with you!
My mother has had her fair share of fairly serious hospital trips recently, and I'd have hated the thought of her being put under such pressure when she was already going through so much mentally - Every time I saw her she was seconds away from a a breakdown, and often did.

It's vile for the patient, it's vile for whoever the proposed carer would be. Why force two people to go through that in front of one another? No one wins??
Never understood it.

Can’t access the article, but the comments from OP are so powerful. Women really are second class citizens when their healthcare can be withdrawn for not complying with this fiction

Live, love, dress however you like. Nobody can change sex. Sex-segregation exists for a reason

Totally agree.
If I needed intimate care I would hate for a male to do it. It should be a basic.

Thank you for sharing RainWithSunnySpells.
It defies belief that we are in this position where the safety & dignity of women is repeatedly compromised because of an ideology - not because of staffing or any other reason - but because adults determined to undermine the safety of women and children have been given inordinate power.

Thank you for your replies and your understanding.

It's a difficult subject for me to talk/write about, but I couldn't stay quiet any longer.

Should be a "right" to the point where they can even discriminate in hiring to have enough staff of the correct sex. Can they do that already?

What if you are requesting opposite sex care? Should that also be a right? (People will occasionally request opposite sex for medical examinations, so maybe it will also come up with this kind of care.)

"What if you are requesting opposite sex care? Should that also be a right?"

I don't think that opposite-sex intimate care has the same connotations in regard to the safety, privacy and dignity of the patient (especially when it is in regard to toileting and also the sanitary care of menstruating women). Is it possible that opposite-sex intimate care as a right could be misused by some male patients?

I would love to hear the thoughts of others about this subject.

I’m a HCP (not a nurse) as part of my training I had to assist with intimate care, including what OP described and showering. I would never want a man to be doing it, it’s humiliating enough without it being done by a man, I would feel very vulnerable and violated. I think everyone should have a right to request only same sex HCP for this.

I agree in principle with everything you are saying but sometimes they simply just don't have a female member of staff there. So then what? Would she remain uncared for?

Ideally you are of course right

For that to work we need enough carers. There is a massive shortage of care staff

The simple fact is that it might not have been possible to provide carers of the same sex. May literally be you have to accept Opposite sex care staff or there is noone.

This is a complete strawman. This isn't the argument, is it? Or the issue being discussed.
It's not about female carer shortages. It's about women being intimidated and forced to accept intimate care from male people, even when it distresses them, even when there is no female carer shortage.
It's about women being allowed privacy, respect and autonomy over their own bodies by default.
If female carers are in such short supply (and they substantially outnumber male ones), then it should be treated the same way as any other carer shortage. Basic bodily respect for women in vulnerable positions should be the absolute baseline of interactions, not treated as if its some kind of gift to be handed out and taken away on the whim of whoever is in charge

You seem to miss that that is exactly the point.

Values and basic care standards are all very well, but if you don't have the female staff you simply can't do it.

Sometimes it does come down to what you can do and what you can't do. If you can provide a male carer and you can't provide a female one, and someone insists on only a female carer you can't provide care. The same for a male who insists on only a male carer if the agency only has female carers available. so not really a feminist issue.

It's a care crisis issue

FWIW it does become a feminist issue if we want to discuss how feminism has maybe taken a wrong turn by only valuing traditional men's roles (eg workplace, breadwinner) over traditional female roles (eg carer, nursery staff). Leaving a massive gap in society as these roles are both massively underpaid and undervalued). But I'm not sure we're ready for that discussion yet

Women should be allowed to request - and have - someone of the same sex providing intimate care for them.

I don't care who takes my blood or my vital signs but if it's intimate care I want another woman providing it. And I completely understand if men want the same thing.

Some posters on here are very keen to trample over women's rights aren't they?

This is the law:

The Health and Social Care Act 2008 (Regulated Activities) Regulations 2014: Regulation 10
• 10(1) Service users must be treated with dignity and respect
This states providers must have regard to the following guidance:
• When providing intimate or personal care, providers must make every reasonable effort to make sure that they respect people's preferences about who delivers their care and treatment, such as requesting staff of a specified gender

80% of adult social care workers are female. There should never be any issue for a provider in ensuring a woman has another woman providing intimate care.

For our safety, privacy and dignity, I don't believe men should ever provide intimate care for women and girls. Too many of them are predatory.

There was a case in the US of a woman who had suffered a brain injury as a child (she fell into a pond, was oxygen-deprived, became comatose and never regained consciousness) who was raped and became pregnant by a male employee of the care home in which she resided.

Of course it's not a staffing issue! Stonewall and all the other queer theory groups roaming the NHS are not in the slightest bit interested in staffing. Their sole interest is in wedging men into women's wards, showers etc and ensuring that women (and men) lose the right to request same sex care.
Of course there are staffing shortages - but that's of nor interest to the misogynists embedded in the NHS. Safeguarding and safety for women is being abandoned in favour of men's rights.
When you know that some hospitals go so far as to find ways of placing male born sex offenders on women's wards, you get a sense of the dangerous type of people embedded in senior positions in the NHS:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9854261/Convicts-born-male-identify-female-placed-women-wards.html