Hospital 'wanted to send OAP victim of sex attack back to a mixed ward'

They claimed staff attempted to transfer the frail 82-year-old - who suffers from dementia - back into a mixed ward days after the alleged attack.

They backed the Daily Mail's long-running campaign to eradicate mixed-sex "wards of shame", describing them as totally inappropriate for vulnerable, elderly patients.

The woman had been taken to the Royal Bolton Hospital with a chest infection earlier this month when she and a second woman aged 76 were allegedly attacked by a male patient in a medical assessment unit.

Unlike one in six trusts, the hospital, in Greater Manchester, complies with NHS guidelines which state that male and female patients should only be made to share specialist units such as A&E and intensive care.

But they are allowed to class ordinary wards as single-sex even if it is only the individual bays which are men-only or women-only, not the entire ward.

Campaigners say these are little better than the fully mixed-sex wards which Labour claims to have abolished.

The 82-year-old patient is said to have been offered a place on such a ward a week after the incident.

Her daughter-in-law said: "I want to see these wards scrapped - I can't believe old, vulnerable patients are put in this position.

"When the hospital asked if they could move her back on to a mixedsex ward, we were furious and said no immediately.

"All wards, without exception, should be single- sex. I want hospital management to act immediately and get rid of any mixed wards at the Royal Bolton Hospital. I don't want this to happen to anyone else."

She added that the family still did not know how her mother-in-law - who cannot be named for legal reasons - had been affected by her ordeal.

"We are hoping that she isn't aware of what has happened to her," she said.

"She hasn't mentioned it at all but we're terrified that she does remember something but is too proud to tell us."

Hospital chiefs are still working with police to establish exactly what happened and said they could not comment specifically on the allegation concerning the two women.

But trust spokesman Heather Edwards insisted it complied with national guidelines.

She added: "Sometimes members of the public become confused when a ward contains single-sex bays - this complies with national guidance as the male and female patients are nursed separately and have different toilet and washing facilities."

The case - first reported in the Mail last week - has once more highlighted the Government's failure to fulfil its pledge to eradicate mixed-sex wards which have blighted the NHS since the 1970s.

The Mail launched its campaign to scrap the "wards of shame" in 1994, highlighting a series of sexual assaults and alleged rapes blamed on a practice of making men and women share which was branded "abhorrent" by patients' groups.

Labour promised to get rid of them but ten years after they won power ministers were last month forced to admit that 28 out of 172 trusts in England still had mixed-sex wards.

Alarmingly, Royal Bolton Hospital was one of the trusts which did meet the target.

A 41-year-old man has appeared in court charged with sexually touching a woman without consent and sexual activity with a woman with a mental disorder. He was remanded in custody.