Patients facing mixed ward misery

Hospital patients in the Black Country and Staffordshire are still being admitted to mixed-sex wards – and being forced to use uni-sex bathrooms and showers, an alarming new survey today reveals.

The Healthcare Commission found wide variations in patients' experience in cleanliness. Health trusts in the region also scored poorly on the quality of meals and their overall level of care. Less than a third of patients in Walsall and Mid Staffordshire hospitals rated their overall care as "excellent".

Around two thirds of patients rated the cleanliness levels of wards for the Royal Wolverhampton and Dudley hospitals NHS trusts as "very clean", compared with 36 per cent of patients in Walsall.

Patients were not impressed with the meals provided by Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust which scored in the bottom 20 per cent of trusts in the country on hospital meals.

More than a fifth surveyed rated the meals "poor".

And Worcestershire Hospitals Acute Trust also failed to whet the appetite either with 19 per cent of its patients giving it a similar rating.

Forty per cent of patients surveyed in Walsall said they had shared a ward with patients of the opposite sex, along with with 34 per cent in Mid-Staffordshire and 29 per cent in Sandwell.

Some 40 per cent of patients in Walsall also said they had had to use the same bathroom or shower as a patient of the opposite sex.

Around 37 per cent of patients complained of the same in Mid-Staffs, 35 per cent in Wolverhampton and 20 per cent in Sandwell.

Healthcare Commission chief executive Anna Walker said the survey had revealed striking variations between hospitals, with some "struggling to deliver on some of the basics of hospital care".