Pledge to end mixed-sex hospital wards by end of 2010
Patients' groups have questioned how the goal can be achieved during a period of cut backs The coalition government is preparing to announce an end to most mixed-sex hospital wards in England by the end of the year, it has been reported.
Despite Labour committing to the policy when it won power in 1997, it failed to completely abolish them.
Health Secretary Andrew Lansley said bringing about the change was a priority, but patients' groups have questioned how it could be achieved.
The move would apply to all wards except for intensive care and A&E.
It would mean patients sharing sleeping, bathroom and toilet facilities only with people of the same sex. This could be through single rooms or whole wards occupied by men or women only, or mixed wards in which men and women are separated in bays or rooms.
Mr Lansley said: "I have made clear repeatedly my deep frustration at the fact that mixed-sex accommodation has not been eliminated from the NHS.
"Eliminating mixed-sex accommodation is in patients' best interests, and I made clear the priority I attach to it in the revised Operating Framework published in June. I will have more to say on this shortly."
The Daily Telegraph said Mr Lansley had asked Chief Nursing Officer Dame Christine Beasley to visit all hospital trusts that still have mixed-sex wards to see what they were doing to ensure that male and female patients did not have to share facilities.
Cost of conversionCatherine Murphy, of the Patients Association, told the newspaper: "Given that each incoming secretary of state, and there have been a lot, and every new prime minister has made this same pledge since 1997, we will wait to see if this time it really is more than just rhetoric.
Analysis
Although mixed sex wards are still distressing for many patients - they are no longer the great political issue they once were - when Tony Blair first promised to get rid of them in 1997.
Its estimated now that only around one in ten hospital wards are still mixed sex.
Labour eventually concluded it would be impossible to abolish all of them - because of the disproportionate costs involved in converting some of the older Victorian hospitals.
And like Mr Lansley, Labour too threatened to fine NHS trusts which failed to get rid of them.
If anything it may be even harder for Mr Lansley to achieve because of the costs pressures now on the NHS. For although the NHS budget is set to increase in real terms, hospital managers are still having to make sweeping savings to meet rising health care costs.
Many NHS managers may well conclude they simply don't have the money to carry out expensive building work.
"At a time when we know that there are huge savings that have to be made in the health service, it is hard to see how hospitals are going to find the money for this."
The BBC's political correspondent Norman Smith said only about one in 10 wards in England were still mixed-sex, and the majority of those were in old, redbrick, Victorian hospitals which would be very expensive to convert.
He said the previous government decided that the money needed to do so would be better spent elsewhere in the NHS.
Now, however, the suggestion appeared to be that any hospitals which failed to remove mixed-sex wards by a certain deadline could be fined, our correspondent added.
Two years ago, Lord Darzi, who was made a health minister by Gordon Brown, said providing single-sex wards across the NHS was an "aspiration that cannot be met".
