Breaches of single-sex hospital ward rules more than treble since pandemic

NHS England data reveals that rules prohibiting mixed-sex wards have been broken over 25,000 times in the six months to March. Despite a government ban in 2010, almost 4,500 instances of patients being forced to share accommodation with the opposite sex were recorded in March alone. This represents a trebling of such cases since before the pandemic. Penalties for such rule breaches were reintroduced in October 2021.