Weekend Question 3: Got Any Nationalized Health Care Stories?

ANSWER: It’s been a while, hasn’t it? This one will make you wish the wait had been longer.

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What sadistic person came up with the idea of mixed wards, even for seriously hurt members of the military?

Why the UK’s National Health Service, of course (WARNING: much of the content at the link is R-Rated and disturbing; HT Interested-Participant):

Being in hospital is bad enough, but being treated in a mixed sex ward is the medical pits, the final humiliation for the weak and the stricken.

….. According to the Patients’ Association, the number of complaints from women being treated on mixed sex wards in hospitals has doubled in the last 12 months, although I would argue that it’s not just the females who suffer. We’re all in this terrible mess together, even if officials deny that the number of patients being treated on mixed wards is on the rise. As the Patients’ Association says, a curtain whisked between two beds does not count as separate accommodation.

Tony Blair has been promising to do something about mixed wards for years, but, predictably, nothing much has happened. He originally pledged his good and true intentions in a Labour manifesto back in the mists of time when mandrake was still used as a medical anaesthetic and Mandelson was still sizing up his first property deal. Following this initial pledge, as Leader of the Opposition in 1996, Blair went on to thunder mightily: “Is it beyond the collective wits of the Government and health administrators to deal with this problem?”

Sadly, the answer seems to be yes, yes and yes again, Tony. The only progression our great leader has made on mixed wards is by craftily adding a piquant new variant into the healthcare system; allowing wounded soldiers to be treated alongside civilian patients in NHS hospitals. As most specialist military hospitals have now been closed down, Servicemen and women who have killed and seen colleagues killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are having their wounds and injuries treated in mixed civilian wards – those very same wards which, at times, seem barely able to cope with hip fractures and the occasional case of acute advanced dandruff, let alone traumatised troops fresh off the battlefield.

Following a public outcry, the Prime Minister has agreed that it is important that our soldiers get specialist healthcare and hopes to introduce military-managed wards within the NHS. While we are all keeping our fingers crossed on that one, it seems that mixed-sex civilian wards of the type I was in show no sign of going away, even if Labour promised to close them down a decade ago. Perhaps they think we should all be grateful for receiving any healthcare at all.

Two commenters at the Telegraph article said it best:

If all MPs and members of their families had to be in a mixed ward whenever they were hospitalised, mixed wards would very rapidly be abolished! - They find the suffering of ‘ordinary people’ easy to bear.
Posted by Margarete on November 22, 2006 10:28 AM

Mixed sex wards are a total disgrace. The NHS has turned into a vile, wayward entity that lumbers along from disaster to disaster. The nursing staff I have encountered are badly trained and not sympathetic. The doctors are in short supply. Sounds like a scene from one of Florence Nightingale’s wards. It is all very well having money thrown at the NHS, but there is no one who knows how to spend it. Shambolic,dirty wards with nurses who really have lost the will to nurse are becoming commonplace.
Posted by Carol Collier on November 22, 2006 7:08 AM

Ah yes, the wonders of nationalized health care. Why would anybody wish it on anyone else?