IPFCC Challenges Hospitals to
Eliminate Restrictive Visiting Policies
Better Together: Partnering with Families
"We have concentrated our attention on the risks of visitation and lost sight of the benefits. When we close our facilities to visitors because we fear a few individuals, many are harmed."
Tejal K. Gandhi, MD, MPH, CPPS, Chief Safety and Transformation Officer, Press Ganey, in an interview conducted by the Betsy Lehman Center for Patient Safety (February 2022)
Isolating patients at their most vulnerable time from the people who know them best places them at risk for medical error, emotional harm, inconsistencies in care, lack of preparedness for the transitions of care, and unnecessary costs. Yet in many hospitals and health systems, visiting policies still separate families and other loved ones during hospital stays.
IPFCC's campaign, Better Together: Partnering with Families, equips hospital leaders with the rationale, tools, and support needed to change visiting policies and to recognize families and other care partners as allies for quality and safety.
The Better Together Toolkit contains a multitude of resources for hospitals to use in changing visiting policies and practice.
Building on a January 2022 PFCC.Connect Informal Conversation and information gathered from hospitals and organizations across North America, this new IPFCC resource showcases inspiring strategies to safely support family presence during a pandemic as well as examples of effective partnerships with patients and families in planning and decision-making.
As we learned more about the COVID-19 pandemic, the serious harms of new restrictions on family presence in hospitals and other care settings were increasingly recognized. To encourage organizations to “revisit” their policies, IPFCC developed a free, online resource to guide collaborative decision-making in achieving a better balance between benefits and harms – for patients, families, clinicians, and communities.
View the recording of the webinar, Better Together: Recommitting to Family Presence. Additional resources for the webinar are available.
Learn about Healthcare Excellence Canada's program, Essential Together, for hospitals and other care settings to support families as essential care partners.
This video collage was developed during the launch of the Better Together campaign. Some of the individuals featured may now have different titles or work in other organizations. However, their messages about family presence are still very relevant.