A Conservative peer has complained to the Care Quality Commission (CQC) after a private hospital was accused of refusing to treat a patient who asked for an all-female nursing team. The Telegraph has more.
The Princess Grace Hospital in Marylebone, in the West End of London, allegedly told a patient she could not have complex colorectal surgery after she asked for single-sex accommodation and said she did not wish to use pronouns.
The patient, a retired lawyer, told MailOnline that during a clinical pre-op assessment, which involved intimate procedures, she believed she had encountered a transgender woman in a blonde wig and make-up who had made eye contact with her.
“I began to wonder if it was just a coincidence that this member of staff with a ‘gender identity’ had made their presence felt to me in such an inappropriate way during my first visit,” she said.
“I began to suspect that I had been targeted because my patient records showed that I refused to use pronouns and wanted single sex facilities, although I have no evidence of this.”
The patient, who said she is a victim of sexual assault, said she then wrote to the hospital’s parent company, HCA, requesting single-sex nursing care. She said she believed that “mixed sex hospital facilities are unsafe for women”.
The patient claimed she then received an email from Maxine Estop Green, the hospital’s Chief Executive, telling her the operation was cancelled and that the hospital “did not share her beliefs”.
The email said the hospital was committed to protecting staff from what is described as “unacceptable distress”.
Baroness Nicholson, Chairman of the parliamentary campaign group Children and Women First, has written to the hospital’s Chief Executive saying she was “astonished” to read the email stating that an operation was being cancelled because the hospital didn’t share a patient’s beliefs. She demanded that the hospital release a list of their “beliefs” and called on the CQC to launch an investigation.
The CQC confirmed it had received a letter from Baroness Nicholson and said it would “be responding directly in due course”.
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