A new study published by the Healthcare Commission has found that last year almost 3.2m patients were admitted to mixed-sex wards, six years after our government promised to get rid of them.

There are worse things than mixed-sex wards: inadequate food or water, murderous bugs, or just general filth. My piano tuner was woken in hospital by a nurse screaming because she had trodden on a cockroach. But a mixed ward, even with separate bays, can be a nasty experience. My mother wasn't too keen on it. Only feet away from her were strange men in occasionally gaping pyjamas, with tubes attached to intimate places. A bloke in a baseball cap and nightie, with his leg in plaster, lurched up and down the ward wanting to chat, and another fellow stumbled about at night, groping suspiciously in his trousers. He eventually managed to smuggle in some lager, drank it and attacked a nurse with a stick.

My mother and other elderly women patients were awake and terrified all night, which didn't aid their recovery. But apart from the fear of assault - and there are quite a few, particularly on mixed psychiatric wards - their main worry was shared lavatories. If you can get to one. Otherwise it's a bedpan, which is embarrassing enough even next to a female patient, but even worse, especially for older and more modest women, when you're next to a strange man, separated by only a flimsy curtain.

It's no fun for men, either. One friend of mine was terrified that while drugged he might accidentally flash at the nearby women and be arrested. It is dreadful that we can't afford to get rid of mixed wards. But if the NHS is really hard up, I'd rather have a strange man than a cockroach.