More Labour Lies - Mixed hospital wards, pledge cancelled.

Single sex hospital wards another pledge gone.

Tony Blair stated when he was leader of the opposition with regard mixed sex wards in hospitals "Is it beyond the collective wit of the Government to deal with that problem?".

In 1997 the Labour party's promises and repeated in 2001, to bring an end to male and female patients sharing facilities in NHS hospitals. Yet nothing was done and Labour was forced to promise in its manifesto that it would end the wards by 2004.


Yet both here and here that the Department of Health announce that eliminating mixed-sex wards is no longer an aim.

A DoH spokesman said: "We have to get away from this idea of single-sex wards. That is not what it is all about. "Now we are in a situation where we are moving away from a set target on single-sex accommodation and moving towards the NHS locally taking privacy and dignity much more seriously. "It is possible to envisage patient privacy and dignity with patients of different sexes on the same wards but with proper segregation. "There are different ways of ensuring that. It's not about targets. Now it's much more about what the patient feels."

So there you have it, another pledge gone to the wall without even a cigarette or a fucking blindfold.

The shadow health secretary, said: "After 10 years of failing to deliver, Labour now appear willing to betray the interests of patients by dropping their manifesto commitment to abolish mixed-sex wards as patients understand them. "

As recently as last May, Patricia Hewitt made it clear that what she meant by single-sex accommodation excluded partitioned bays. "Now it seems the department are accepting the proposition that patients should be in mixed-sex accommodation with nothing but flimsy partitions between them. "

Tony Blair said it couldn't be beyond the wit of Government to sort it out, but it is clearly beyond the competence of Labour."

In May, Patricia Hewitt, the then Health Secretary, vowed there was more to be done to "meet our commitment to eliminate mixed-sex wards"

Ministers missed at least three self-imposed deadlines. A succession of surveys demonstrated that government claims that only a tiny minority of wards treated both men and women after 2004 did not stand up to scrutiny. The commitment was dropped from the 2005 manifesto but ministers still claimed that mixed-sex wards would become a thing of the past.

**Another day and another lie from New Labour.
Tags: New Labour, Cyclops, Cool Britannia, Politics, amoral cunts

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