‘Conditions Must Improve’ Says Charity

The mental health charity Mind has urged the government to ensure that wards in NHS hospitals are no longer mixed. It is particularly concerned that mental health wards are sometimes unsafe for patients to be on.

Earlier this year the Healthcare Commission’s Count Me In census found that 55 per cent of mental health patients surveyed last year were accommodated in mixed-sex wards. And today a report has revealed that some trusts are struggling to ensure that mixed-sex wards no longer exist.

Commenting, Sophie Corlett, policy director at Mind, said: “We’re very glad that the Department of Health is now acknowledging the scale of this problem. But there must be no respite for ministers until the grim conditions on our mental health wards have been vastly improved. Mental health wards should be the most safe and comforting of all places, yet at the moment, for many people they are the most fearful.”