Over the last few weeks I’ve been working for my agency at a fairly large NHS psychiatric hospital in Sussex. I first started going there occasionally back in 2001. Its okay, there have been improvements to the service recently (as I mentioned in a previous blog) but of course it will always be a “challenging” experience for patients and staff. I won’t go into my general criticisms of the treatment and labelling of people with mental health problems here.
One of the recent changes at the hospital has been a splitting of two previously mixed sex wards into male and female wards. Presumably this was a result of problems with sexual behaviour, probably backed up by “statistical evidence” from “official experts” that single sex wards was the way forward. Or perhaps the media coverage and public outrage of the shock horror scandal of mixed wards still existing in general hospitals, when the government had promised to stop them years ago.
A single sex female psychiatric ward can be a disaster! Whereas previously there were two manageable wards, there is now one quiet and almost pleasant (as pleasant as it can be in a psychiatric hospital) male ward, and one often unsafe and almost impossible to manage ward full of screaming, bitching, hysterical women. It is no joke and dangerous for all concerned.
