Scotland’s NHS is in the grip of a ‘sexual assault crisis’, with nearly 300 attacks in hospitals in five years, as campaigners demand an end to mixed sex wards.
The alarming figures show that between 2019 and 2024 police received 288 reports of sex crimes, including 12 alleged rapes, across 57 hospital sites north of the Border.
More than half – 163 – took place on hospital wards, including one at a children’s hospital and another at a facility for patients receiving palliative care.
Attacks were also reported at two maternity units.
Campaigners and politicians have now called on NHS boards to ensure they are ‘following the law’ and ‘doing everything in their power to provide single-sex spaces to ensure that patients are protected’.
The report, by Carolyn Brown and Mary Howden of Women’s Rights Network Scotland (WRNS), highlighted the extent of abuse across the sector following freedom of information requests to Police Scotland.
But WRNS warned the actual number of assaults was ‘significantly higher’ as details were available on only 57 of the 198 hospitals surveyed, including 11 private ones.
It found that data on sexual assaults ‘was not routinely kept by all hospitals’, with police unable to give information on attacks committed in 133. The report said the force also refused to provide data on eight others on ‘privacy grounds’.
Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow recorded 20 sexual crimes between 2019 and 2024
Tory MSP Tess White said the figures were ‘alarming’
Of all the sexual crimes reported, charges were made against 156 individuals.
Scottish Conservative equalities spokesman Tess White said: ‘These alarming figures expose how the sexual assault crisis in our hospitals has spiralled out of control on the SNP’s watch.
‘Health boards should be following the law and doing everything in their power to provide single-sex spaces to ensure that patients are protected.’
Stobhill Hospital in Glasgow recorded 20 sexual crimes – the highest number of any site north of the Border. It was closely followed by the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, with 18.
One sexual assault was recorded on a ward at the Royal Hospital for Children in Glasgow and another at Roxburghe House, Aberdeen, which provides palliative care.
Nearly 100 incidents were reported in psychiatric hospitals, of which 71 were said to have happened on wards.
Two maternity hospitals, one in NHS Grampian and another in NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde, recorded three sexual assaults and two rapes between them.
The authors said the report ‘identifies a number of long overdue priorities to improve the safeguarding of women in hospitals.’
Maya Forstater, CEO of sex-based rights charity Sex Matters, said the ‘shocking figures’ not only strengthen the argument for ‘single-sex hospital accommodation across Scotland, but the need for these to be operated on the basis of biological sex’.
Royal College of Nursing Scotland executive director Colin Poolman also called on the Scottish Government to ‘do more to address the pressures on the system and constant understaffing’.
The Scottish Government said health boards ‘have a legal duty, and reporting systems in place, to record data on sexual assault, violence and aggression’ and that courts have ‘extensive powers to deal robustly with sexual offending’.
A spokesman added: ‘All instances should be reported and escalated to Police Scotland as quickly as possible.’
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Scotland’s NHS is in the grip of a ‘sexual assault crisis’ with nearly 300 attacks at hospitals in five years as campaigners demand an end to mixed sex wards