Socialist Hospital Wards

In the UK Telegraph, Jan Moir writes about the British National Health Service (NHS) practice of housing patients, including wounded military personnel from Iraq and Afghanistan, in mixed-sex hospital wards.

Servicemen and women who have killed and seen colleagues killed in Iraq and Afghanistan are having their wounds and injuries treated in mixed civilian wards -- those very same wards which, at times, seem barely able to cope with hip fractures and the occasional case of acute advanced dandruff, let alone traumatised troops fresh off the battlefield. Following a public outcry, the Prime Minister has agreed that it is important that our soldiers get specialist healthcare and hopes to introduce military-managed wards within the NHS. While we are all keeping our fingers crossed on that one, it seems that mixed-sex civilian wards of the type I was in show no sign of going away, even if Labour promised to close them down a decade ago. Perhaps they think we should all be grateful for receiving any healthcare at all.

We are, but being in a mixed ward is not like slipping on to a sun bed next to a bloke down by the hotel swimming pool. It's not like freshening your lipstick in the groovy, liberated unisex bathrooms that feature in glamorous American sit-coms. It is a hateful experience for all concerned, as both sexes are forced to cope with individual illness alongside an appalling lack of privacy. Just think about that dreadful, endless bed-ridden business of sluicing, hawking, coughing, impaired bodily functions and those tell-tale male thunderclap night-time noises, plus shoals of vomit, leaky urine bags, catheters, drips, mass incontinence, freight train snores, pyjamas that don't tie up properly in the front and general depression at being ill.

Just lovely. And coming to America if the leftists get their way.