"In general the nursing and medical ..."

Thank you for your comments Michael.

In an ideal world, we would have wards for women and separate wards for men in all specialties at our hospitals. However, this is challenging when we are trying to ensure our equipment and personnel are used to best effect. The way the NHS (and therefore hospitals in Nottingham) work with the wards and resources they have is to take care of patients in single sex ‘bays’. Every ward is divided into bays, each containing between 4 and 6 beds and each bay is designated as either male or female. This means that patients are not in beds next to patients of the opposite sex.

However, in emergency care, including the emergency admissions ward at Nottingham City Hospital, there are exceptions recognised by the Department of Health. In emergency care, the rules about single sex wards do not apply. There are several reasons for this – let us explain.

In ‘emergency medicine’ a patient may come into hospital by ambulance for instance with chest pains. The pain is bad and patient’s symptoms are causing serious concern. There could be a number of medical conditions causing the problem, but without further tests and investigations we do not know. Our priority is therefore to get the patient into bed, monitored and diagnosed as quickly as possible. Therefore, the patient is admitted to an emergency ward, such as the emergency admissions ward, where they will receive care and further investigations and tests to diagnose their condition.

The important thing to note is that emergency medicine wards are short stay. We aim to assess, diagnose and move patients to a specialist ward within 48 hours, and in many cases sooner.

We are sorry to hear that your wife had MRSA and Clostridium difficile. Without knowing the name of the patient and when she was in hospital we are unable to look into this. If you would like to contact our PALS team on 0800 0521195 at Nottingham City Hospital we would be happy to discuss any concerns.

We would like to point out that the ward sister, as the most senior member of nursing staff on the ward, is in charge of each ward. With regard to cleaners, we have in-house cleaning teams at both Queen’s Medical Centre and Nottingham City Hospital who report to the Hotel Services Managers for both sites and ultimately the Director of Facilities for the Trust. We do not have any contract cleaners working at our hospitals, with the exception of our Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat Centre at QMC, which is a PFI build.

We are currently reviewing the responsibilities for cleaners to bring them under the control of ward managers.