Trans patients should be treated in separate rooms in hospital under Tory plans
Transgender people will be treated in single rooms in hospitals in England under new government plans to update the NHS constitution.
The proposal follows a pledge last year by then Health Secretary Steve Barclay to prevent people who have changed their gender identity from being treated in male- or female-only wards.
The plan is included in a series of proposed changes to the NHS Constitutionwhich sets out the rights patients have in terms of the care they can expect from the NHS.
Hospital bosses responded by accusing ministers of dragging the NHS “into a pre-election culture war debate” and ignoring much more pressing issues such as the long wait for care.
The proposals also include a reaffirmation of patients’ existing rights to request to receive only “intimate care” – such as an examination of their breasts, genitals or rectum – by hospital staff of the same sex as themselves, and to stay in a room of the same sex. department.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said the aim was to improve the privacy, dignity and safety of all patients, including transgender people.
But Matthew Taylor, the chief executive of the NHS Confederation, which represents hospital trusts, told ministers it was important that “the NHS is not drawn into a pre-election culture war debate”.
The debate over changing the constitution “should not be about making headlines,” he added.
Ministers would be better off putting forward detailed plans to improve funding for the NHS, tackle the dilapidated state of many health care facilities and return waiting times for emergency rooms and elective surgeries to the levels that existed when the constitution was first introduced was published in 2012, he said.
Dr. Emma Runswick, the deputy chairman of the British Medical Association council, also criticized the plans for how the NHS should manage transgender hospital patients.
“Some of the proposed changes to the NHS Constitution risk causing more harm than good, with the potential to fuel further discrimination, harassment and exclusion of an already marginalized group,” she said.
“If these proposed changes come into effect, transgender and non-binary patients may have limited access to essential NHS services.”
Taylor described the proposed new guidelines as ambiguous. It does not explicitly state that hospitals must routinely place a trans person in a single room. But it seems like this will happen in general.
It says that when hospitals consider how to apply long-standing single-sex ward policies to those who have changed genders, the needs of each patient on the ward should be taken into account.
It also highlights “the concerns patients may have about sharing hospital accommodation with patients of the opposite sex”.
“When making these decisions, it is important to balance the impact on all users of the service and demonstrate that there are sufficient good reasons to restrict or change a transgender person’s access,” the report said .
Giving a single room to a trans person would be justified under the Equality Act 2010 because it “enables the provision of same-sex or single-sex services where certain conditions are met”.
Maria Caulfield, the minister for women’s health strategy, said the government wanted the NHS to accommodate requests for same-sex intimate care and for her to stay in a sex unit.
But Wes Streeting, the shadow health secretary, insisted that NHS figures showed “the use of mixed wards has exploded under the Tories. Last year, women had to spend the night in wards alongside male patients 44,000 times, twenty times as many as ten years ago, endangering the safety of large numbers of people.”