Healthcare Equality Index: Visitation Policies
Visitation by family and friends is important to a patient’s healing process. Visitors should be a welcomed part of patient treatment. Healthcare facilities are faced with the challenge of striking a balance between the patient’s much-needed support from visitors and the healthcare and privacy needs of the patient and others. To achieve this balance, healthcare facilities implement visitation policies that outline protocol around patient visitation. These policies can be facility-wide or specific to a unit and often include parameters around who is permitted to visit and when. Visitation access is often determined by a facility’s definition of family. Same-sex partners and same-sex parents are not always recognized as family due to inadequate visitation policies and staff training.
Healthcare facilities must ensure that their visitation policies are inclusive of the LGBT community.The Healthcare Equality Index requires participants to incorporate an explicitly LGBT inclusive definition of “family” for visitation policy purposes.
Visitation Policies and Definition of Family
Visitation policies generally establish a definition of permitted visitors and then enumerate specific restrictions on an otherwise general grant of visitor access. Delineating permitted visitors is typically achieved through a definition of “family.” This definition is used to establish the parameters for permitted visitors and enumerate any specific restrictions for security, health, and operational concerns. It is essential to the equal treatment of LGBT individuals that healthcare institutions adopt an explicitly LGBT-inclusive definition of “family.”Implementing LGBT-Inclusive Visitation Policies
Depending on a healthcare facility’s existing policy design and preferences, there are two ways in which visitation policies can be made inclusive of the LGBT community
- Include explicitly inclusive definition of “family” within their existing stand-alone visitation policy.
- Incorporate this explicitly inclusive definition of “family” into existing stand-alone visitation policy by direct reference to a companion “definitions” policy section.
