Family Visitation in the PACU

We're piloting a family visitation policy. It's been rocky. We allow families to come back within 45 minutes of a patient's arrival - never mind if the patient has uncontrolled pain, is sitting on a bed pan, is freaking out. It makes it very hard to be pushing narcotics q 3 minutes when you can't get to a pt's IV because his wife HAS to hold his hand (the one with the IV). Then they start asking for lip balm for their family member, etc, while you're trying to stablize your other patient.

Maintaining privacy is hard too - we close the curtains, but at one time, a pt's monitor went off (because she went into asystole) and we couldn't find which pt was having trouble. We had to go down the line and look in each curtain to locate it. Ridiculous and unsafe!

We let families in for a 10 - 20 minute visit, and families start getting mad when we try to escort them out: "You're only going to let me see my wife for 10 minutes? How can you keep me away from her? She needs me!" And when the liaison nurse comes to escort them out, they say, "Well, she's kicking me out!" or "here's comes the mean lady!"

Then patients wander outside the curtains and answer their cell phones, walk around the PACU and talk, etc. Toddlers and babies start screaming and wandering around. We've educated them about this, but they just don't care.

Then we have the family members who faint and become another patient - which we can barely handle our real load of patients, thank you!

This whole family visitation came into play when we started holding patients for hours on end, because we don't have enough beds on the floors and units. Our job is 100 times harder. I don't feel like I can concentrate on pt care because of constant distraction from families. The other day we didn't allow family members in because of construction, and it was so much better! I get that patients feel better when they can see their familiy members - but it needs to be for a short time - like once - not multiple times throughout the day, with multiple people switching out.

We try to limit visits to 2 visitors at a time, but they try to stretch it with "but why can't he see his mother too? And his sister? And his friend from college..." Each time we have to escort the families back to the waiting room - our liaison doesn't have time to keep going back and forth, when we have 14 patients, with multiple family members in there at all times. Why don't these people visit the patient the next day, when they're stable, awake and their pain is controlled? And they're in a room that is private and can hold more people?

Ugh. It's just crazy. But we have to be customer service reps! Are we in retail or the restaurant industry, or is this a freaking hospital?

....We use video's for Kids day, does anyone else do that? We've noticed that the kids cry less and we use less pain medication due to the distraction.