Bedside ban is just sick
Get your backside off the bed' is the latest order for doctors and visitors in hospitals from Northumberland to Cornwall.
How long before the same applies at Sunderland Royal?
Whoever dreamed up this one needs their backside kicking into gear and
straight onto the wards.
It's a classic case of shifting the blame on to us while being seen to be doing something to clean up the wards as patients worryingly run the risk of being worse when they come out than when they went in.
There is no hard evidence that banning flowers and sitting on beds prevents the spread of infections.
And this is a ruling that should never have been brought in. It's a retrograde step, given even dying souls will be denied this last little bit of loving comfort of close communion with their nearest and dearest.
How callous that hospital trusts should impose on sick, vulnerable and frightened people the sacrifice of this very basic and crucial right to warmth, closeness and a little bit of happiness, which is in all too short supply in hospitals. It is shameful and a shame.
For those of us who have been in hospital, the caring doctor who sits on your bed and makes you feel more of a person than a mere number, is worth his or her weight in gold.
How long before they stop us giving our loved ones a kiss or holding their hand?
Time to curb this clinical, dictatorial dehumanising. When you're in hospital you are crying out for loving concern and to be denied the very natural milk of human kindness, the closeness of another, is blind and baleful bureaucracy.
We have to turn the tide. I'm all for campaigning for more homeliness in hospitals as suggested by top doctor, Iona Heath, who in condemning this latest ban in the British Medical Journal, said: "Some of the most intimate and effective interactions between doctor and patient that I have either witnessed or experienced have occurred while the doctor has been sitting on the patient's bed.
"Such interactions are precious and should be made easier rather than more difficult."
Such rules, she rightly said, have no place in hospitals where there is little enough joy.
And Dr Heath, a London GP, challenges us all with: "Can we not campaign for home within hospital and encourage flowers and sitting on the bed and every other informality unless there is robust evidence to deter us?"
Of course we can, but that means speaking out and so many when their loved ones are in hospital are loath to say anything lest it compromise the patient.
I hope there is a public outcry and chief executives sit up and take notice.
It's a fact that the best medicine we can give to those who are sick doesn't just come out of a bottle but from a loving touch best given sitting beside them on the bed. That's something we all respond to in this other world which is already cheerless enough, without spreading more cold comfort...
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Friday 10 February 2012
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