NHS Policy Audit - working party - thread #2

[KnottyAuty]

This is a thread about “keeping the receipts” on NHS Policies prior to the Supreme Court ruling on 16th April 2025.

Our working theory is that there were no single sex spaces for NHS Staff or Patients in the entire country before that date, having all been removed by stealth. We are aiming to prove this by auditing websites and policies for all the UK trusts and using the results to raise public awareness. As well as recording what has happened historically, the information will form a baseline so we can check which Trusts comply or defy the judgement in due course.

We are working around the country region by region. If you fancy getting involved in a bit of grassroots feminism then please do join in to help!? Each trust takes about an hour to research and you can upload online without giving any personal details away. Comment below and we can give you the link to an online survey - it changes for each region.

Thanks soooo much to all the vipers who have helped so far and @ Twoloons for doing a great job with the thread wrangling!

Here are the press articles we’ve managed to generate so far:

Scotland:
25th March: The Telegraph
https://archive.is/dTUhY
26th March: Scottish Daily Express
https://archive.is/kaLCB
26th March: The Telegraph
https://archive.is/iSD9m

London:
21st April: The Telegraph
https://archive.is/awGuz
23rd April: The Telegraph (in conjunction with another thread by NHS mumsnetters)
https://archive.is/1DO8d

Original thread #1 here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5291237-nhs-policy-audit-working-party?page=1

some animals are more equal than others

Gateshead trans staff policy EqIA lists all the PCs except Sex!! Not even there as Gender😡

Oh that’s…marvellous.

🙄

We've also got 'Sex Equality' rather than 'Sex' in the EDI strategy, presented as a quote from the Equality Act... and this gem: [Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans – words used to denote the different ways that individuals choose to define their own gender identity] 🙄

I think it’s fair to say that the policy writers haven’t understood what they were writing and just whacked in whatever word salad they thought would get them Stonewall points…

And Stonewall clearly didn’t do much quality control either - further evidence that the whole thing is nothing more than a money-making scheme …

Possibly written by an early prototype of ChatGPT.

😂🤔

Hi there. If you’re offering to audit a trust, I can give you one from our list, if you like?

Happy to. Is there a template/form to follow or specific questions to ask? Sorry but still getting the hang of what to do here.

DBTH submitted, please allocate me another as you wish, will get to it midweek-ish

I used to sit on a Policy Review Group for an NHS Trust. The meetings were something to behold. Nobody actually knew how to write a policy, so they would just make stuff up and plagiarise sections from other organisations' policies. These were all senior staff members. I was quite shocked at the time, but now I think it must be par for the course across the NHS.

Having read oh about 100 of these things, your description makes perfect sense. There are loads of sections in closely linked trusts’ policies that are word-for-word identical except for little flourishes that someone random, with no clue whatsoever, seems to have added.

Doesn’t make me less pissed off about the whole thing. Sigh.

100? Oh, I'm sorry 😂
It was a fairly painful part of my job, and I soon learned to intervene selectively in policies that could come back to bite me. The volume of errors was so great, and I felt I was the only person who noticed, so it was an impossible task to make the corrections. There was no legal oversight, and I don't think anyone considered the legal implications of what they were writing. They didn't know what they didn't know, y'know?

The searching is all done online, and there’s a form for you to fill in with what you find. The form is pretty self-explanatory (and has lots of instructions), and most people on this thread are fairly experienced now, so if you run into problems you can just post on here.

How about you start with:

Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust

I’ll DM you a link to the form.

I don’t think it’s an NHS thing. Not sure if many people would know how to write a policy from scratch. But even still the stuff they’ve put into these…. It’s a wonder to behold! (And not in a good way)

Many thanks! I can offer you:

Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

Midweek-ish is all good!

I'm sure you're right. In the first meeting I attended, I asked to see the Policy Writing Guidance, and they looked at me like I was mad 😂

A huge chunk including your nemesis phrase about Gillick competency comes from the Chief Nursing Officer memo from 2009, Annex E. Its very possible that GIRES wrote that…. And that’s more or less the wording that rolled out across the country.

It’s like knotweed. Deliberately planted knotweed. How do we untangle all this?

Ugh.

Agree it’s probably a wider problem than the NHS. But in a large private corporation that I am familiar with, policies only see the light of day after appropriate review including in-house legal advice, and finally board sign off. The governance to achieve this is well understood within the management chain and more widely.
Maybe it works because there is accountability, with one or two past examples of director head’s rolling.

In the public sector, there are too many stake holders with a vested interest in perpetuating the status quo, otherwise, for example, the Fife board or Scot health minister would have been sacked or resigned by now.

NHS England's internal Trans Equality Policy is now marked 'under review' but they've made it clear they won't be taking any action to comply with the law until the outcome of the consultation and publication of the EHRC Code of Practice.

Knotweed is killed off by carefully injecting stems with herbicide over a 2 year period. It kills the roots. Meticulous.

Excellent. We are the herbicide. The Ermine Vipers Herbicide Research Group.

Ok, I'll crack on with this in a day or two.