Privacy in hospitals

I have always had a problem with issues of privacy in acute hospitals. I started my career as a clinical psychologist working with people with learning disabilities and being very aware that I was going into people's homes - even when they were in NHS care.

As part of the interview for my first acute hospital job I was paraded through a series of wards to show me the range of services that they provided. Personally, I would have found a written list and discussion more informative and certainly I would prefer not to have been taken past elderly ladies in a state of partial undress when I had no clinical reason to be there.

When working in hospitals I have always felt that I only go into patient areas if I have a specific reason to be there. Conversations with staff could easily be managed in more 'administrative' parts of a ward.

Recently I had the experience of being asked to assess a number of different hospitals and found myself asking the question 'if I was a hotel assessor would I want to be shown into people's bedrooms while they were occupying them?' I admit it would be difficult to check under a pseudonym to try out the clinical care and hotel services but as a patient would I want people wandering around me who had no specific reason to be there?

Perhaps I am oversensitive to this issue and too easily embarrassed - I will admit that even visiting friends in hospital can sometimes be a bit embarrassing when you find them in a state of undress that I feel they would never show to me in their own home.

The NHS has moved on a long way in the 25 years that I worked in it but I still believe that we can all have blind spots for things that we take for granted as being the norm. Is privacy really being adequately recognised?

Paul Robinson,
Director of marketing,
CHKS