University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust: first to comply with the law?

[MyAmpleSheep]

Is this the first NHS domino to fall?

According to a poster on the UK Trans reddit, UHB has conceded that it must comply with FWS, and that single-sex staff facilities are segregated by biological sex.

Transcribing a communication with an employee there:

"This is not a Trust policy or decision, the Trust is implementing the law....

The Supreme Court ruling is a declaration of the existing law under the Equality Act 2010 and how it should operate. Every person, employer and public organisation has a duty to comply with the Act like any other law...
.
We have consulted with legal experts on the risks of non-compliance with the ruling and have acted accordingly...
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The EHRC guidance and statutory code of practice does not impose legal obligations on the organisation- only the courts and tribunals can do this, and as such our legal obligations were effective immediately following the ruling of the Supreme Court."

For some reason, I am put in mind of "Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."

Yes. I was saying that there should not be 100% single occupancy rooms in hospitals. Some are required, yes. But single sex bays are safer overall for the reasons that single sex communal toilets are.

It brings to mind the largest container ships, they are so massive and their momentum is such that they have to turn their engines off four days before they arrive at port.

Then Fife should not have been sharing their legal team with a third party which also doubles the cost to the public purse.

Two years ago, when I had 16 days in hospital on intravenous antibiotics for a very serious attack of cellulitis in my lower leg, I would have given anything for a nice quiet private room with my own handy ensuite. It always took me an appreciable amount of time to hobble painfully down the corridor to the loo with a badly swollen leg and a wheeled walker and I was woken in the middle of every night for a 30 minute slow infusion of the antibiotic and could rarely sleep more than a couple of hours at a time without some disturbance on the ward. I am not a sociable person when ill and would willingly forego companionship for peace and quiet.

I'm getting more than a bit pissed off now.

As women we have known since it came into effect that the Equality Act 2010 didn't allow men (however they identify) to be in women's spaces because of the exceptions in the Act itself.

So how come people whose job it is to know this have got it so fucking wrong for so fucking long?

On the other hand, it might be, "The Supreme Court's statement of the law now supports us in rejecting the trans nonsense".

The first line will be there because their employee will have accused them of a policy that discriminates against trans people. The obvious defence is to point out its a matter of law not policy. They don't need to muddy the waters with a statement that indicates their view on the law either way or seek to justify their decision to act lawfully by explaining they agree. The reference to legal advice will be to message that they have checked and whatever the employee says, know they are acting lawfully.

Theirs is not to reason why ....

ISTR Fife tried to claim that it was vexatious to include him and I guess they felt they had to support him for the same reason they have to pander to the “trans community” in everything else.

Fife board/employees could claim the moon was made out of cheeze but as the Hospital legal team has a primary (only) duty to the Trust that imo creates a conflict of interest where the two client interest allign but are never exactly the same.

It also creates a problem for the Trust in that it gives him possible access to privileged information which is included in the prep case file but not directly used in the case.

By right the Fife Trust needed to do a investigation with a view to a disiplinary on all the staff who were involved in the disiplinary which staff claim was not one (eg what is the Trust position? was it fraud to sign an ED staff member off with pay while "no" HR event was happening? Etc) and allegation of mismanagement of the patient. If he is party to the file on the investigation HR have problems with any other disiplinary (which the board may actually like as its a get out of jail card)

So Fife may have had to fund his team but the question would be why share the team [ < this is the "doubles the cost" per my original post ]

Then Fife should not have been sharing their legal team with a third party [(edit) (which also doubles the cost to the public purse). ]

I agree with you, but I think they didn’t feel they could cut him loose to fend for himself.

I tend to agree too but that is a management failing their duty was to the Trust.

But even the FU to the IOC shows there are serious problems at all levels.

The sentence about checking to see what the result of non compliance would be (paraphrasing) is, to me, merely a wording used to head off TRA insistence on challenging it.

Well, that’s the question we’ve been asking for years, isn’t it? I still remember my internal WTF when confronted with colleagues who clearly were so focussed on justice for anyone who crossdresses anywhere, anytime, for any reason* that they’d completely switched their brains off.

At the time I thought intersectionality meant we were weighing up ALL the reasons why an individual could be disadvantaged - sex, race, sexuality, religion, disability, etc - but it quickly emerged that trans self-declaration trumped everything else.