UK health minister loses his patience with mixed wards
Hospitals face fines if they don't call it curtains by year end
London: Mixed hospital wards will be axed by the end of the year, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has announced.
Patients going in for elective surgery, where they know the date in advance, will be guaranteed a single ward or a private room in the near future.
Lansley's Labour predecessors repeatedly promised to get rid of mixed wards. Alan Johnson even claimed to be close to ‘virtually eliminating' the problem.
But dozens of hospitals still separate men and women with nothing more than a curtain.
Thousands of patients are humiliated and embarrassed, with many forced to suffer the indignity of sharing bathrooms and toilets with the opposite sex.
Lansley will warn hospitals that they face fines and public condemnation unless they abolish mixed-sex wards.
The Health Secretary will also demand that half the beds in new hospital wards are in single-bed rooms, to improve patient privacy and tackle the spread of killer superbugs in open wards.
The announcement marks a victory for the Daily Mail's campaign to abolish mixed wards. The paper repeatedly highlighted Labour's failure to tackle the issue.
A senior Government source told the Mail: "Every person who goes in for elective care will go into single accommodation. "The exception will be if someone is rushed into accident and emergency and they get filtered through. But that's about treating as many people as quickly as possible.
"The final crackdown will come by the end of the year. Andrew has already issued some quite strong guidance to hospital bosses." The move will also exclude intensive care beds.
Labour's 1997 general election manifesto said: "We will work towards the elimination of mixed wards." Tony Blair said it should not be "beyond the collective wit" of the NHS to see that accomplished.
By 2001 the party's pledge was: "Mixed wards will be abolished". But in April 2008, Johnson was on the back foot, telling a Royal College of Nursing conference: "I hope that by next year's conference you would have seen us meet what is now becoming a rather frayed-at-the-edges manifesto commitment."
