Hospitals Are Asking Men If They Are PREGNANT
In Liverpool, the Walton Centre NHS Trust now asks ‘all patients under the age of 60, regardless of how you may identify your gender’ whether they could be having a baby.
It is understood to be one of a handful of trusts to have expanded the questioning despite it not being a national policy at NHS England.
The dangers that radiotherapy, diagnostic imaging and nuclear medicine pose to an unborn child mean medics must find out whether a patient is pregnant before carrying out the procedures.
In 2017, regulations regarding these checks were updated by the Department of Health to be more inclusive – changing those who should be questioned from ‘females of childbearing age’ to ‘individuals of childbearing potential’.
Campaigners warned yesterday that it was the beginning of a ‘clinically dangerous’ move to record only gender, and not sex, on medical records.
And they said that those born male cannot conceive.
Patients and their families have also complained of ‘unnecessary confusion and agitation’ for vulnerable patients.
The Society of Radiographers last November advised medics it was ‘important to check with all patients for any possibility of pregnancy’.
A spokesman for the Walton trust told the Daily Telegraph that its policy ‘adheres to national legislation, as certain amounts of radiation can be harmful to foetuses in utero’.
Source: Daily Mail
