THE TRUST running the city’s hospitals says it will not face a £126,000 fine for breaking rules banning mixed-sex wards.

Hundreds of patients in Worcestershire are being placed in wards with the opposite sex despite facing a potentially steep fine for doing so.

A spokesman for the trust said it would not be fined but could not explain the reason why as the Worcester News went to press.

According to data from NHS England, the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust recorded 504 instances of ‘unjustified’ mixed-sex accommodation in the 12 months to April 2018.

Rules have been in place since 2011 to ensure that patients only have to sleep in single-sex accommodation, which campaigners say is vital for protecting patients’ dignity.

Hospital trusts that breach the rules by placing a patient in accommodation with the opposite sex face a £250 fine each time.

This means that the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust could have faced a bill of up to £126,000 over the 12 month period to April.

However, the total sum may have been less as the penalty fines were relaxed between January and February 2018 during the winter crisis.

Over the 12 month period from April 2017 to 2018, the Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust’s worst performance was in December 2017, when 59 patients were placed in mixed-sex wards.

The rate at which breaches were occurring in April 2018 - the most recent month for which data is available - was 4 per 1,000 patients.

This was higher than the national average of 1 per 1,000 patients for the same month.

Across the country, breaches of the rules - which cover any instance in which a patient is admitted and placed on a bed or trolley, even if they do not stay the night - are on the increase, more than doubling from 675 in April 2017 to 1,584 the following year.

Despite this national trend, more than half of all trusts in England recorded no breaches at all during the same period. A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: “The NHS was extremely busy over the winter period with added pressure from norovirus, flu and extreme weather, but despite this more than half of trusts have reported zero mixed sex accommodation breaches.”