Going into hospital can be a worrying experience for many people. If they have to share sleeping accommodation or bathroom facilities with members of the opposite sex, it can be even more stressful.
As well as providing excellent standards of clinical care, the NHS is committed to ensuring that, during their time in hospital, patients get the privacy they need and are treated with dignity.
Today, same-sex accommodation is the norm for most patients in the NHS: less than one in ten patients who are in hospital for planned care report that they had to share a room with a member of the opposite sex. But patients who have experienced mixed-sex accommodation say they felt this compromised their privacy and dignity at a time when they already felt vulnerable, and this was a concern for them and their families.
For this reason, the Department of Health asked the Design Council to bring designers, manufacturers and frontline NHS staff together to see if they could come up with new ideas that would help the NHS improve hospital environments and the experiences of patients. This applied not only to same-sex accommodation, but also to the whole patient experience while in hospital, including what patients wear and how they interact within
the hospital.
Six teams of designers and manufacturers, as well as healthcare design specialists from the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre came up with innovative new designs that show how different privacy and dignity issues could be solved.
These initial design concepts and prototypes will be tested and refined before being made available to hospitals, but what they demonstrate is how designers, working closely with patients and healthcare experts, can bring new thinking to real and important challenges and come up with creative new solutions.
What we mean by ‘same-sex accommodation’
Same-sex accommodation means that while they are in hospital, patients share sleeping accommodation and bathroom and toilet facilities only with people of the same sex.
A wider programme of improvement
In 2009, the Department of Health launched the Delivering Same-Sex Accommodation programme, which builds on the significant progress already made to ensure that same-sex accommodation contributes to a better experience for patients. At the same time, a £100 million Privacy and Dignity Fund was made available to support the NHS in making lasting improvements to the care environment and help it organise care around patients’ needs and expectations.