HEALTH CARE : Co-Ed Hospital Wards Draw Protests From British Patients : Proposed law would give clients the right to choose.

The growing practice in British hospitals of placing patients in co-ed wards has come under increasing criticism.

“For women, particularly older ones, being treated in a mixed-sex ward can be a very unsettling experience, very embarrassing,” said Gyneth Donovan, an official with Women’s Health, a private organization that advises female patients.

“The lack of privacy, the need for bedpans, can lead to humiliation for patients in a mixed ward,” she added. “And not just for women. Men too are not used to being with the other sex in such intimate settings.”

A Labor Party peer, Lord Stoddart, has presented a bill in Parliament that would require patients be given a choice of wards, mixed or single-sex.

“Mixed wards can be outrageous,” he said. “Patients deserve to be treated with consideration and dignity.”

Stoddart has seen his bill through the House of Lords, and it is now in the House of Commons, where it has been stalled by a Conservative government trying to reduce expenses in the National Health Service.

Since the time of Florence Nightingale a century ago, British hospitals have prided themselves on providing sympathetic nursing care. But in the last 20 years, hospitals have begun to combine men’s and women’s wards to save money.

“We would not do this in the case of gynecological or obstetric patients,” said a spokeswoman at London’s new Chelsea and Westminster Hospital. “But for general patients, we sometimes have mixed patients.”

A woman who recently underwent a knee operation at the hospital described her experience in a ward of three women and three men: “One of the women was an elderly nun. She had never been around men before, let alone in a bed near them. She was afraid to remove her clothes.”

A male patient at London’s Charing Cross Hospital remembers being awakened by an elderly woman who had been to the bathroom and was attempting to get into the wrong bed.

“It was embarrassing,” he said. “Two nurses helped her away. As if we--all of us--didn’t have enough postoperative medical problems.”

Some women’s groups have asked authorities to ensure that patients in the national health program are admitted to single-sex wards if they wish.

And the Health Department has established new guidelines urging that patient preferences be respected “wherever possible” and that toilet and washing facilities be single-sex.

“Many people are rightly concerned about being cared for in a ward together with members of the opposite sex,” Health Minister Virginia Bottomley said. “This practice . . . cannot be removed overnight and, in some cases of very specialized care, it is unavoidable.”

Many of the concerned groups agree with Bottomley that intensive care often must be mixed for the most effective use of resources.

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Women say that space in separate facilities can be scarce and that, rather than wait, they accept what is available.

And, Donovan pointed out, patients in outlying areas must sometimes choose between a bed in a mixed ward nearby or a single-sex bed miles from home.

Some health care organizatiojs are busy trying to save hospitals that face closure because of lack of patients, particularly in central London.

“We’re trying to save St. Bart’s in London,” one campaigner said of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. “It’s been here for 900 years, and the government wanted to close it. So pushing for separate-sex wards is lower on our priorities.”

But Stoddart is committed to pushing his bill through Parliament.

“I’ve gotten a thousand letters on the issue,” he said. “They all tell the same story, often in harrowing terms, and say the same thing: The policy of mixed wards has utter disregard for people’s feelings.”