A MALE nurse yesterday won a case of sex discrimination brought against an NHS trust that refused to allow him to carry out routine procedures on female patients without a chaperone.

Andrew Moyhing, 29, from London, had complained that the policy, which applied only to male nurses, was unfair as it was based on the stereotypical assumption that he would represent a danger to women because he was a man.

The case arose during Mr Moyhing’s third year of training three years ago, when he was told that a female member of staff would have to chaperone him while using an electrocardiogram machine on a female patient.

He complained that female staff were allowed to conduct the same procedure on male and female patients with no chaperone present.

His initial claim of sex discrimination against Bart’s and the London NHS Trust was unsuccessful, but yesterday an Employment Appeal Tribunal ruled in his favour.

The tribunal held that while not all male students would have objected to having a chaperone imposed, Mr Moyhing did, as it made him feel that he was considered untrustworthy. As that was not an unreasonable reaction to the situation, the trust’s policy constituted discrimination.

Mr Moyhing, who left nursing over the issue to work in financial services, said he hoped that the decision would herald the beginning of an era when nursing could draw equally on the skills of both male and female students.

“Male nurses are still seen as a bit of an oddity simply because there are so many more women in the profession than men, despite the fact that so many doctors are male.

“I believe that ultimately if male students are treated more equally, those such as myself who abandon nursing as a career will stay on and the numbers will start to equalise,” he said.

Mr Moyhing, whose mother was also a nurse, declined to accept an award of £750 compensation because he said he did not want to divert resources from the NHS.

“I hope that the NHS will look at its policies on the chaperoning of male nurses and develop them in the light of this judgment,” he said.

Jenny Watson, chairwoman of the Equal Opportunities Commission, which supported Mr Moyhing’s case, said that the trust’s chaperoning policy had been based on lazy stereotyping and the assumption that all men are sexual predators.

“This type of discrimination against men based on misconceptions about their behaviour does nothing to help ensure patient safety,” she said.

The case had raised important issues about the segregation of male and female professions. EOC research showed that more than a quarter of boys in school are interested in caring work, yet only 1 in 10 nurses is a man, as is only 1 in 50 childcare workers.

“This disconnect between levels of interest and the tiny numbers of men entering the caring professions won’t be closed until we challenge our assumptions about the type of jobs that modern men should do,” Ms Watson said.

Charlie Sheldon, deputy director of nursing at Bart’s and the London NHS Trust, said the fact that the award to Mr Moyhing was only £750 showed that the tribunal considered the harm done to him was minor. It implied that Mr Moyhing had “displayed an exaggerated and unduly sensitive reaction to being chaperoned”, he said.

In the process, the idea that male nurses were second-class citizens had been “soundly rejected”.

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