Healthcare visiting guide
Enabling family presence in a COVID-19 normal world
“We are seeing COVID-centred care, not patient-centred care.”
Download our report here:
Download the print at home version
Background
Five months into the pandemic in NSW, we are grateful for the hard work and dedication of NSW Health staff, clinicians and the management of the NSW Health response.
In amidst the quick and largely effective responses, there have also been some negative, unintended and significant consequences to patients and families navigating a very different health care landscape.
To continue to combat the threat of the virus together, and using the hindsight built from experience so far, we have engaged with leading consumer representatives to support the decision-making process.
Consumer Leaders Taskforce and Consumer Representative Hub
To facilitate community input, we have formed the COVID-19 Consumer Leaders Taskforce and the COVID-19 Consumer Representative Hub in April and May. The Taskforce consists of leading Consumer Representatives in NSW who lean on input from the consumer representative hub to support NSW’ Covid-19 response.
The two groups pinpointed visiting policies and family presence in healthcare settings as a priority and today, together with HCNSW, we publish the set of principles.
Our report
The report outlines a set of principles, as developed by health consumer representatives, in response to the challenges faced by NSW Health with protecting staff, patients, families, and all who enter the facilities, from COVID-19.
We hope it will inform and bring to the fore patient and family perspectives around the issues faced by restricting patients’ visitors into health facilities. It recognises each of the stakeholder groups as essential and significant players in keeping each other safe and acknowledges that no one stakeholder group can succeed alone. We are all dependent on each other.
It’s a pragmatic document that can be used to review and reframe family presence responses including the patients and their families’ views.
Join our online COVID-19: Consumer Representative Hub here on Amplify.
