No hospital visitors

[Creamegg84]

I understand "the covid risk" but when are hospitals going to allow visitors again?
My elderly aunt age 94 has been in hospital for 2 weeks Completely alone. She is deaf. None of us can go in and advocate for her. She told a staff member that the family have abandoned her & forgotten about her but we are ringing every day (taking hours to get through aswell) and they aren't telling her that we have called.
Her care home are refusing to have her back and she now needs medical care but the hospital say she's medically fit to be released. She can't even hold her own head up. We have no idea who to speak to or to find out what's happening.

I cannot begin to imagine how many thousands of elderly people are in hospital right now completely alone, with no family there to support them, bed blocking and basically just lying in a hospital bed.

My cousin (age 50) is in intensive care in the same hospital. Had internal bleeding and a stroke 3 weeks ago. Has been in an induced coma, now awake but with tracheostomy. Again no visitors allowed including his wife or mother, and cannot even video call as he can't talk because of the trach. I feel like this is one of the biggest crisis of the pandemic. The damage to mental health caused to vulnerable people in hospital must be huge. My aunt is giving up on life and we have no way to help her

I think if you can't get through on the phone go in person and insist on seeing your relative. They will find it harder to fob you off.

Can you send your relatives a get well card with a message in or are flowers still allowed in hospitals ?
Florists can make small flowers that fit onto a hospital bedside table

Personally I would call the Daily Mail and ask them to start a campaign to insist that visitors are allowed in all hospitals for anyone that wants them.

My elderly neighbour was taken into hospital a couple of weeks ago. His wife wasn't allowed to visit. The ward never answered the phone. She only managed to speak to a doctor once who told her he wasn't going to pull through.
She rang the ward again and they lifted the phone and left it off the hook for 20 minutes while she was on the other end and could hear all the staff talking. No-one spoke to her and then the phone cut off.
She rang PALS who arranged a phone call to her DH within an hour.
He died three days later.
He didn't have covid but even if he had she should have been allowed to visit for end of life.

This problem will literally kill some people.

My father will refuse hospital admission if he's conscious because he's utterly convinced he'll die in there after the last stint where they starved & dehydrated him to the point that when the physio on his team went to visit (we phoned and expressed concern to them that dad wasn't being cared for) that they raised a formal complaint about his care. I'm pretty certain they saved his life last time.

Dealing with the shitty hell that is MND is bad enough without wondering if the very people meant to help my dad will be the ones who hasten the end of the disease.

I cant believe this is still going on. Thankfully the hospitals here (west of Scotland) are back to allowing visitors. We're allowed one person per day. To have no visitors at this stage of the pandemic is appaling

It’s absolutely disgusting. There’s no reason that one nominated, fully vaccinated, LFT tested visitor can’t go in.
There are nursing homes still locked down due to Covid cases.

Sending lots of hugs to all going through this. My 78 year old father was admitted to hospital from GP surgery on Monday. It took my mother and I 14 hours with both of us calling to get through to A&E and get someone to pick up and tell us where he was. I literally called every 5 minutes from 9pm-11am. My mother has asked for his hospital doctor to call us with an update 4 times now in the past 3 days yet still no phone call. She was allowed her first visit with him today for 30 minutes. She has had to fight for that too as they said visits have to be booked 24 hours before yet he has been moved around 3 times now so that makes it impossible to know which ward to book visits with. To complicate matters he refuses to talk about what’s wrong with him so we are completely in the dark other than what little info we have been told.

I find it infuriating and disgraceful that this is still going on, and even that it was actually allowed to take such a hold in the first place.

My 87 year old Dad died alone in hospital almost a year ago (last March). He had been in two different hospitals for the best part of three weeks, with a disastrous break of three or four days at home in the middle of it (due to an unsafe and failed discharge, which was extremely distressing and traumatic).

We couldn't visit. He spent all of that time in hospital isolated and alone (so perhaps the failed discharge that wrongly sent him home did have a small silver lining in that we actually saw him).

He didn't even have fucking Covid and nor did any of us. The vaccination program was just being rolled out and we had all recently had our first doses, including him.

This nonsense is harmful, inhumane and completely over the top. Visitors who are vaccinated and perhaps showing negative LFT results should be allowed in if the patient wishes to see them.

Sorry to hear that they Stll not allowing visitors. I have personal experience of this. My dad went into hospital unfortunately he died 3 months later. We were unable to see or visit him during that time due to covid rules. It’s horrible to think that we weren’t able to help/visit him in his last days. Luckily we were able to be with him as he passed away. But doesn’t help that we weren’t with him those last few months. Felt like we abandoned him but know it wasn’t anything we had done wrong. So sad that we unable to visit our relatives when they need us most.
I am now helping my mum who has 3 carers in a day. Dreading it if she needs to go into hospital I can’t visit as it will. Have a big impact on her.

I feel really strongly that everyone should be allowed visitors. My Mum was in hospital in October and there was a blanket no visiting rule and for me it was the hardest part. We were lucky in some ways - the ward made their own rules of one visitor a week, and Mum could use her mobile - but she wouldn't do video calls. I work in a different hospital and currently patients are allowed one visitor per day - which I think is a good compromise and the government should impose on all trusts. (Covid outbreaks permitting). I have to say other than going to PALS on your MP I don't know the best way to get this changed, but it is so important that it is, some of the examples on this thread are heart breaking.

Have a look on the hospital website for PALS. I had a similar situation in January, our hospital had something similar to PALS & they got things sorted by the same day after a week of meaningless phone calls. There will be a hospital Social Worker involved, ask the hospital operator to put you through. Normal Local Authority Social Workers don't work within hospitals. Make sure a Discharde Nurse is involved in care, they can do MDT assessment if required.

Assuming you are in England that is?

I had a similar situation with my mother before Christmas. I phoned EVERYONE!! It took days!! but eventually, I managed to say the right thing to the right person. I emailed patient liaison but I suspect the structure is different in Ireland. She spoke with the ward sister and amazingly quickly, she was coming home. It then took days to make sure that the woman who had been in a coma for 2.5 months, had enough support when she came home. That has been totally lacking, it is only because she is actually miraculously OK that it has not become a crisis. My mother has had an infected toe since god knows how long.. she was paying a podiatrist to look after her feet and this person completely ignored her toes. She was in hospital for 4 months and nothing was done. 2 months after she has come out of hospital she has finally seen someone who did not simply pass her along to someone else, she has antibiotics prescribed for her feet and her toe is no longer throbbing. It has been like that for more than 6 months and she has seen countless medical staff in that time and it has been pointed out to numerous people. She has had inflammation in her oesophagus for years due to a combination of medications used to treat various symptoms. Over the years she has been admitted with bleeding from her stomach and this has caused a few problems over the past few months as she has been on heparin for a blood clot and she aspirated her stomach contents due to the stomach inflammation and she had pneumonia as a result. Every time... they say they can't find anything, it's inflammation, it can be treated with medication, but they give her nothing, they also do not investigate the drugs and the impact they have on the gut. We have read the patient leaflets and the contra indications and questioned why she was on X when this could be contributing or why she was on Y for 6 months when it is only supposed to be used for a maximum of 14 days, or why Z drug is no longer on her medication as dispensed from the pharmacy and the most recent one.. who identified that she is allergic to the mood stabilising drug that is apparently crucial to her mental health, how was this identified, what does it mean, was it causing some of these issues and what does it mean for her psychiatric care.. no one will answer.. the only thing they say is .. you need to ask your psychiatrist, GP, the doctors at the hospital. but none of those people will answer the questions. My mother doesn't know half of this... because she spent months in a coma, she doesn't know that she was sedated to have her stomach checked and didn't come out of the sedation so when she was asked if she wanted to stay awake for the next investigation, she had no idea of the potential consequences of her answer. My father is half deaf and a proud man who is not able to admit that he hasn't understood everything and not likely to ask questions because the doctors are under pressure and they are doing their best. I don't live near her which makes it more difficult but I in despair about the future of our world if this is how people are cared for and I do not want to get old. It is heart breaking and inhumane. I was told that the ward sister thought that my Dad didn't want to see my Mum so they didn't tell him that the visiting restrictions had been lifted. I told them that it was not their place to make that assessment and that she had children who wanted to visit her.. but couldn't because of the restrictions that were on the hospital website. She was also on a COVID ward, without COVID, she never had COVID... we kept asking why.. they said she was safer there in her own room that she would be on a busier ward but on that ward, she wasn't even seeing staff all that often and they were fully gowned up, plus she was terrified as she was surrounded by people who were dying and she was terrified that she would catch it. I am so angry and I just don't have a way of making it better. Hospital staff are under a huge amount of pressure but I hope they put humanity above rules soon.

My friend is in a care home and visiting has been banned since before Christmas.

@LIZS

Usually they will allow a carer for a vulnerable patient.

🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 94, severely frail and with delirium not allowed visitors until on end of life care.

It's really not good enough for elderly people to bel left alone in hospital.

It’s sickening. My dad was very poorly a couple of weeks ago. No ambulances, we had to carry him to the car and leave him at the a and e door to go in with a security guard. I honestly thought that was the last time we would see him.

Thankfully some heavy duty antibiotics sorted him out and he’s home and on the mend but it was a difficult few days- he was too frail and sick to speak to us on the phone and we felt like we were bothering the staff by phoning for updates.

It saddens me to think of all those patients in for weeks on end and alone. It’s not good enough. The elderly, in particular, deserve so much more than this. They are being failed in their most vulnerable moments

Rules at my hospital changed last week to allowing visitors, but only one named visitor throughout their stay, so hopefully they will all be changing soon. Patients who are end of life have been allowed free visiting thoughout though. I have to add that the phone is always answered if there is a ward clerk on but otherwise the nurses would sometimes have to neglect the patients to answer the phone as they are often too short staffed and on a ward full of elderly patients that would lead to falls/patients not getting the care they need. We also assist patients to use phones when we have time (frail elderly unit, a lot have mobiles that their relatives insist they have but they can't use them or they don't send the charger🤦) and relatives are allowed to accompany the patients in A & E. It is really strange that the rules are not the same everywhere!

A friend's dad, 90, blind and deaf, had a heart attack and stroke a week ago. He is in hospital but not allowed any visitors.

He has a mobile phone which he could use to keep in touch, since his speech is affected, but his arm/hand is affected, so he can't ring anyone, or answer when they ring. As no one is helping him use the phone, the family are desperately worried that he may not be being helped to eat or drink either.

They have been told he is about to be moved out of hospital for rehab, but no visitors will be allowed there either.

Sorry - his speech is UNaffected

There are volunteer vacancies at our hospital to help on the wards. They can help with things like facilitating patient calls.

I wish more people did this as it really does take the pressure off the nursing staff, and can make a real difference to patients and their families.

It is utterly ridiculous that volunteers are going in to help people keep in touch with loved ones when loved ones are being kept out! Outside hospitals people are doing whatever they want and restrictions have more or less disappeared. It is completely wrong to prevent people from having contact with relatives.

@cansu I completely agree! It's crazy.

I understand that hospitals are going to allow an essential care giver for patients as they do in care homes. I am one for my mum. I do a pcr once a week and a lft before each visit. I'm allowed to visit her in her room. I fill in a questionnaire each time. No one has asked to see my negative lft on my phone yet. In 2020 my mum was hospitalised at least 3 times. On her last hospitalisation she could designate 2 visitors who could visit twice a day forgone hour.- They had to wear a mask and sign in with name and telephone no. With the decrease in covid nos I don't know why they can't at least do this. At least my mum had a mobile phone so she could contact me. She is in her early nineties.