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Report warns new NHS England policy could be seriously detrimental to trans patients’ health
Discrimination could lead to them “avoiding accessing healthcare at all.”
Last week, the National Health Service in England issued new guidance stating that access to single-sex wards, bathrooms, and changing rooms should be determined by a person’s biological sex rather than gender identity.
An internal NHS impact assessment addressing the guidance says trans patients will almost certainly face adverse consequences.
Trans people could face life-threatening delays and unequal treatment under the new rules, states the report, obtained by the Guardian. They may even experience a level of discrimination that would lead to them “avoiding accessing healthcare at all.”
The report also warned, “There may be delays and a greater risk of ‘corridor care’ for trans people with a negative impact on their physical and mental health and wellbeing if side rooms are not available.
“Trans people may fear and potentially experience discrimination by being ‘outed’ as trans through not being accommodated in a ward that aligns with their lived gender or being placed in a side room.”
There is also the risk that hospitals won’t have private room capacity for trans patients when needed, potentially denying them timely care, as well as forcing them “into the potentially distressing situation of being accommodated on wards aligned with their biological sex.”
The new policy could also have a “negative impact on fostering good relations” between cis and transgender people, the report predicted, as staff would have to “balance the needs of one group against the other,” potentially resulting in animosity and division.
On Tuesday, the mother of a 27-year-old trans woman who died in 2023 following a delay in care that advocates allege was related to her gender identity spoke out about her daughter being forced to wait for a private room.
Her daughter Joelle had an aggressive form of lymphoma, she recounted, which is “almost entirely curable when treated immediately, but it is rapidly and certainly fatal when treatment is delayed.”
While she said there was an available bed on the women’s cancer ward, Joelle was forced to wait 16 days for a rare single room.
“Joelle was placed there because she was trans,” her mother alleged. “She was refused the available bed on the cancer ward because it was in a multi-bed women’s ward.”
The delay “cost her her life.”
(c) 2026, LGBTQ Nation
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