Visitors Charter

Visitors Charter for ESNEFT patients

We know that visits to patients from friends and family play a really important part in helping us to provide the best patient care and experience.

We welcome visitors to our inpatient wards from 8am to 8pm (excluding mealtimes unless you are helping your loved one with their meal). This open visiting helps our patients and supports loved ones and carers to feel more involved in their care.

Our priority is to create a calm and restful environment for our patients.

To help us do this we ask our staff to:

• Be respectful, polite, professional and welcoming to you at all times.
• Be supportive of visitors who wish to participate in the care of their loved one.
• Create a calm and restful environment to help patients recover.
• Keep family members and the next of kin informed of any information with the patients’ permission, including arranging for you to speak to a member of the medical team
• Do all we can to prevent infection – this may mean restricting visiting times, restricting who can visit and moving patients to an allocated side room.
• Provide a clean care environment.
• Prioritise the planning of care to our patients and communicate our decisions.
• Be respectful to each patient and ensure we understand who is important in their life and try to facilitate appropriate visiting for everyone, including children
• Be willing to listen and open to feedback.
• Welcome carers and work in partnership with you to find out whether your loved one has any additional needs such as dementia, learning disabilities or visual and hearing impairments and what we can do to best support them.

We ask our patients and visitors to:

• Be respectful and polite to staff and other patients and visitors.
• Ensure that no more than two people visit at any one time (including children). In exceptional circumstances this can be discussed with the nurse in charge and alternative arrangements agreed.
• Please help us to provide a calm and restful environment to help our patients recover. We ask that noise levels are kept to a minimum and mobile phones are on silent. If you bring children to visit, we ask that they do not run around. Should there be disruption we may have to ask that they leave. If this happens, please be respectful of our decision and understand why we are making this difficult choice.
• Please support us in providing privacy and dignity for the patient you are visiting and those in the vicinity. There may be times when a member of staff asks you to leave for a short time to help us do this.
• Please be understanding if we have to make changes to visiting arrangements during times where we are trying to prevent infection
• Please do not film or take photographs on our wards. We understand there may be reasons why you may want to take pictures of your loved ones, with their consent. However we would ask that you consider the sensitive nature of our wards and realise that you may unintentionally capture confidential conversations on film or other patients in the background of your photos who have not consented.
• Understand and respect that information cannot be given out unless the patient has given their permission—if you feel you do not have sufficient information, please let us know
• Help us to protect mealtimes for our patients and only arrange to visit at that time if you would like to support your loved one to eat their meal. If you would like to do this, please don’t hesitate to speak to the ward team.
• Let us know if you would like to help with the care of your loved one.
• Please tell us if your loved one needs any extra support, for example if they have dementia, any learning disabilities, visual or hearing impairments.
• Check with the ward team that it is safe before helping your loved one to get out of bed or move around.
• Recognise that due to patient care priorities you may have to wait to speak to medical staff

We want to work with you to support you and the person you are visiting as much as possible during their hospital stay.

Please help us by following our requests that have laid out in this visitor charter.