Protecting patients' privacy and dignity is an essential part of delivering high-quality care for all.

Providing same-sex accommodation is a powerful sign of our commitment to treating all patients with respect, and to making their time in hospital as comfortable as possible. Everyone working in the NHS has a vital part to play in achieving the goal of eliminating mixed-sex accommodation in hospitals. In 2009 100 million was made available for projects across the country, this was known as the Privacy and Dignity Fund. In London that meant that over 100 projects were funded in 22 organisations, a programme of investment totalling over 15 millions, all focused on improving the patient environment and eliminating mixed-sex accommodation in hospitals.

This included new and refurbished ward facilities and same-sex sanitary facilities such as bathrooms, with the remainder spent on other work including:

• increasing the number of single rooms
• putting up privacy curtains
• adding partitions to bays
• putting in sliding doors in four-bedded bays
• installing new patient monitoring equipment to allow more flexible patient use
• putting up new signs
• turning a storeroom into two-bedded en-suite bay
• erecting walls to separate spaces

In 2010 improvement work was focussed on the implementation of the national reporting of same sex accommodation sleeping breaches across the country (This included areas not previously included like admission areas, endoscopy units and day surgery units). The information is monitored on a monthly basis and published so that it is available for patients to view. To ensure this information is both consistent and comparable, the NHS London Lead worked closely with Hospital Trusts to agree a monitoring framework and definitions (based on the DH guidance), and then held a number of workshops so that clinical staff were all using the same standards. Reporting was introduced in December 2010, and since that time the number of same sex accommodation sleeping breaches has continued to fall. In fact over the last six months the number of breaches has reduced by approximately 90% (in line with the reduction across the country), and feedback from the national in-patient survey reflects this improvement with a reduction in patients reporting that they experienced mixed sleeping accommodation when they were in hospital in 2010 in comparison to 2009.

All Trusts are now expected to declare compliance every year that they meet the expected standards of patient environment and same sex accommodation and in combination with regular inspection visits, there is greater assurance that this long standing problem is finally being eliminated.

You can find out more information about same-sex accommodation on the Institute of Innovation and Improvement website

Delivering same sex accommodation