Is there a case for single sex wards?

Why did wards go mixed in the first place? In the 1960s, when the old long-stay wards began to empty, the prevailing ideology was that mixed gender institutions were healthier places than single sex ones. Mixed sex education was increas ing in schools and even in previously male Oxbridge colleges. Within psychiatry, mixed sex in-patient units were introduced by the therapeutic community movement, developed primarily by Maxwell Jones (e.g. Jones, 1982). Writing about the first year of a therapeutic community at Dingleton Hospital in 1963, Jones appears to view staff concerns that relaxing rules would lead to sexual licence as a hurdle to be taken in the process of gradually granting patients more freedom, which they would use responsibly: "The issue of permissiveness and licence created