Editorial: It is appropriate to have single sex spaces in Northern Ireland hospitals

​It is easy, amid all the reports on chaos in the NHS, to miss the glimpses of what it could be.

​One such glimpse is provided by the Ulster Hospital on the eastern edge of Belfast.

Not much more than a decade ago it had some wards that had seemed state of the art when the hospital opened in the 1960s but had long since come to seem tired and dated. Now most of the hospital has fine, modern wards in which most in-patients get their own room with en suite facilities.

The dignity that such facilities provide seems a world away from the sometimes mixed wards in which people would change, be washed, go to the toilet and in many instances die a few feet from another patient, with the only privacy being a curtain pulled round the bed.

This newer hospital is a vision of what all of NI would have in its acute hospitals if politicians would find the courage to explain to the public that the province needs a smaller number of better hospitals. In other words, we can’t have perfect provision in every large town.

While hospitals with the older general wards have typically tried to have single gender wards, that has not always been possible.

It is remarkable that many of the activists who support a radical approach to trans issues, such as having unisex toilets or wards, are also people who support feminism and the good treatment of the elderly. How then do they square such an approach with the fact that it is often older women who most dislike shared, unisex facilities?

Mike Nesbitt, the health minister, is entirely right – and will have major public support – in his belief that changing rooms and toilets in hospitals can reasonably be made single sex spaces.

This is common sense of the variety that has been missing in the lurch towards some of the more radical trans policy making of recent years.