Hospitals to be fined if mixed-sex wards continue

From January, hospitals in England will be required to place all patients in single-sex accommodation – with any breaches made public and financial penalties imposed.

Only accident and emergency and intensive care wards will be exempt from the new regulations, Health Secretary Andrew Lansley warned, unless there was "compelling clinical justification".

He added: "It should be more than an expectation, it should be a requirement that patients who are admitted should be admitted to single-sex accommodation.Patients should be in single-sex accommodation, meaning that all of their period that they are admitted they should be in a bed or a bay which only consists of people of the same sex.

"And they should be able to come and go, for example to all their washing and toilet facilities, without having to pass through a part of the ward or another ward where there might be people of a different sex...so to that extent they would have the kind of privacy and dignity people have a right to expect."

While some hospitals had already declared they had "virtually eliminated" mixed-sex wards, Mr Lansley said there were in fact "thousands of breaches" across the country.Figures released by the Department of Health showed that in the first quarter of 2010-11, NHS organisations reported 8,028 breaches where patients were accommodated in mixed-sex accommodation without clinical justification

The data was collected from half of England's Strategic Health Authorities. If the same level of reporting existed across the remaining Strategic Health Authorities, it suggests that, across England, there were at least 16,000 breaches in the first quarter alone, and more than 64,000 every year.

"That is not acceptable, so what I will be looking for from the end of this year is a system by which we are very clear that the requirement is that patients should be admitted to single-sex accommodation," Mr Lansley said.

Hospitals will be required to report on any failures to meet the standard of single-sex accommodation, how often they failed to meet it and why.

Chief Nursing Officer Christine Beasley welcomed the move but Jo Webber, deputy policy director of the NHS Confederation which represents 95 per cent of NHS organisations, said: "A large number of the facilities which still need to be changed are old building stock and will need substantial re-investment in order to meet this target."