Same sex accommodation –
improving the patient experience
We remain committed to limit mixed sex areas to essential high care areas only, such as critical care. Even in these areas there are strict guidelines to ensure that privacy and dignity are maintained for patients.
For a hospital to say that it has same-sex accommodation, it must provide sleeping areas and toilet and washing facilities that are for men or women only. This will mean different things in different hospitals. You could be:
- in a same-sex ward, where the whole ward is occupied by either men or women only
- in a single room, or
- in a mixed ward, where men and women are in separate bays or rooms.
Toilet and washing facilities should be easy to get to, not a long way from your bed. You shouldn’t have to go through accommodation or toilet, or washing facilities used by the opposite sex, to get to your own.
Our commitment to privacy and dignity is embodied in a ward level action plan, key elements of which are:
- Ensuring staff are wearing their identity badge
- Improving the use of curtains around beds
- Minimising noise at night
- Peer audits of privacy and dignity
- Introduced goals for answering call bells and telephones
- Improving the quality of gowns available for patients
- Improving privacy and dignity in diagnostic areas
- Ensuring patients are appropriately covered when being transferred around the hospital.
