Family and Visitation Rights

[monkago2009]

In your professional experience, how has the definition of "family" come into conflict? Have you seen or experienced discrimination in a client's right to have their loved ones at their bedside? As nurses, we are obligated to care for our patients. What happens if the client is gay, and their partner wants to be present? Have you experienced any situations where you were not able to care for your client as well as you would like, due to policy or prejudice within the facility or the staff?

[Pepper The Cat, BSN, RN]

the visitation regulations was only for Blood related family members and legal spouse

So an adopted child could not visit? If someone was engaged their fiance(e) could not visit? A friend cannot visit? An in-law?

Sounds like a difficult rule to regulate.

I would just tell my pt to tell her partner to say that she was her sister. Then she could visit!

[pajoopie1]

I had an awful situation where the adult children thought the second wife was poisoning the patient/ father.

They told me to keep the wife away. Not my job! I told them to call the hospital police or police department if they were concerned for his safety.

[MunoRN, RN]

Well not all hospitals are obligated, only those that work with federal funding.

There are privet hospitals and in my case a very Catholic Hospital that don't recognize same sex partners as a family members.

Federal funding includes medicare coverage as well, your hospital really doesn't accept any medicare coverage at all?

I also work for a Catholic organization, our visiting policy leaves it up to the patient to decide who they want to visit and who they don't. I don't believe we've ever had a legal-family only policy, although our visitation policies have been written by the floor nurses for some time now. I'm not sure what the organization's view is on it, although since it's up to floor nurses to enforce, it doesn't really matter to much what the nuns who run our company think they should be. They can make whatever rules they want (and they do), although that rarely means we actually follow them.