Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate—

(a)

notes that:

(i)

throughout Australian hospitals, patients are managed in mixed gender wards and that assault, trauma and violence are too often perpetrated on women patients in acute inpatient facilities,

(ii)

a survey on assaults on women while being treated as inpatients in public hospitals shows that 27 per cent of female patients questioned (N=117) had experienced broadly defined physical assault, 63 per cent had experienced verbal assault and 58.5 per cent felt intimidated and unsafe in the inpatient unit,

(iii)

many male patients are admitted to hospital because their behaviour (due to their illness) is often disinhibited or aggressive,

(iv)

many female patients have sexual abuse histories and hence fare very badly in this environment, and

(v)

women patients cannot lock the doors to their hospital rooms for treatment safety reasons and so feel totally vulnerable; and

(b)

calls on the Government to raise with the states, as a matter of urgency, the need to re-designate acute psychiatry inpatient units to have ‘women-only areas’ and/or separate male and female wards, as is the case in many other countries, for the safety and privacy of women in these settings.

Question agreed to.