Tom Penn writes at:
www.neoconscription.wordpress.com
Twitter: @NeoConscription
Although the bluff of Freedom Day was announced almost five months ago on July 19, it appears that virtually all hospitals are Have you ever wondered what conscription might feel like?
Well you’re already 20 months into the reinvented version of it.
Consider your curiosity sated.
e still operating within the visitation guidance applicable to the third Lockdown, last updated March 16, and some of which would doubtless have been carried over from the previous two Lockdowns. The NHS really are refusing to move on.
Hull University Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust are not unique in having actually tightened the leash further on these measures; to shield their patients from the invented tyranny of the thus-far impotent Omicron variant. All hospitals in England seem to be modifying months-old guidance at will and to suit the tastes of their respective Trusts.
Laying aside one’s opinion on the pandemic – its origins, and its engineers if a manufactured crisis, its political failures if genuine – and also then laying aside one’s opinion as it relates to healthcare settings, what is quite astonishing is that individual health institutions have been granted free-reign to tinker with Covid-19 control measures unchecked, and with doubtless disastrous consequences for millions.
Such free license to play Jenga with the rules will have ruinous physical and emotional implications for those upon whom the tower persistently falls, as all it merely takes is a single and especially hypochondriacal (or sensibly cautious, depending on your pandemic stance) Trust executive to wield his or her’s influence, and an end-of-life visitation can be tragically denied, or an infant in Neonatal Intensive Care may pass away with only one (masked) parent present, for example.
Across the board visits to wards are still severely restricted, and must not only be booked in advance but are contingent upon a negative lateral flow test result, but:
East Surrey Hospital say they can facilitate one hour-long visit per day per patient, but it must always be the same nominated visitor, whereas University Hospital Southampton say that inpatients who have been in hospital for longer than seven days (they do not specify inpatient age) are only permitted three visits per week at the discretion of the hospital.
The even more miserly Princess Alexandra Hospital Trust only permit visits for a maximum of 45 minutes, and even then the visitor must scan their NHS Track and Trace QR code to gain entry, whereas Cambridge University Hospitals Trust say that visitation appointments can only be booked 48 hours after admission; meaning the inpatient must open their stay in hospital with a full two days alone. Their food court is also closed to visitors.
Dorset County Hospital are still recommending that the nominated visitor is from the inpatient’s household or support-bubble, whereas Norfolk and Norwich University Hospitals Trust, Royal Bolton Hospital, Wirral University Teaching Hospital, and Epsom and St. Helier University Hospitals Trust, among many, many others, maintain a suspension on ward visits in all but exceptional circumstances.
Again, laying opinions on masks aside, of all the places one would expect the ‘rules’ to be more stringently enforced it would be in a hospital, yet here too there are great variations. Across the board they are mandatory for all visitors, yet hardly any hospital seems to make any acknowledgement of the validity of a ‘self-certified’ exemption.
One hospital says that if wearing a surgical mask is intolerable then a visor must be worn, unless you can demonstrate your exemption: something not in line with gov.uk’s overall guidance here, and a subject roundly omitted from their brief hospital-specific guidance here. Many others say visitors shall also have to don aprons and gloves when visiting wards, and on top of that bring as few bags, coats and gifts as possible. One particular facility is saying that coats and jackets must also be removed upon entry!
On and on the pick-and-mix guidance goes, but there are two visitation domains which stand out above all others for their cruel vagaries.
As is now the norm in post-Covid/midst-Omicron England, it is children – those at least risk from the virus and who have been recognised by both the UKHSA and the JCVI as insignificant drivers of transmission – nevertheless smacked hardest by Covid-19 health controls.
East Suffolk and North Essex Hospital Trust say that only in exceptional circumstances are children able to visit their wards. Royal Papworth Hospital on the other hand concede no such wiggle-room with the terse ‘Children are not permitted on site’, as if vermin.
‘No children under 16 are permitted to visit unless for compassionate reasons at the discretion of the nurse in charge’, says one hospital. ‘There must only ever be one person with the child at any one time’, says another.
On Surrey and Sussex Healthcare Trust’s children’s wards, ‘no siblings are allowed.’ On Chelsea and Westminster’s, children (including siblings) are not even permitted on the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and virtually all hospitals agree that only one parent can accompany a child onto hospital premises or visit them on the ward at any one time: Neonatal Intensive Care included.
The mental and emotional implications of these demented protocols require no exploration. Regardless of one’s pandemic stance they should be abundantly clear and comprehensible to all but the entirely morally bankrupt.
The protocols around end-of-life visitation are not much better; the running theme being that these visits shall only be given clearance well in advance, and only post a rigorous health and safety assessment from the team in charge of the poor soul’s care; as if to offer comfort to a loved one about to depart this world were a State-granted privilege and not a human right.
One visitor or two? Children allowed or not allowed? 45 minutes or an hour? Every day or only thrice weekly? No mask, or mask plus gloves and apron? I’m afraid you will have to check with your local Trust on the matter of end-of-life visitation – protocol all subject to rapid change – and whilst you’re at it, try not to go contracting anything terminal, or break a leg even, because the future will suddenly become very bleak in more ways than one.
As for maternity care, it may be prudent for all expectant mothers to contact their local hospital to gain some understanding of what giving birth in the Covid era may look like, because it shall undoubtedly vary greatly from region to region.
With the arrival of Omicron, hospital health control measures can only get more severe. Considering that all facilities are already operating according to guidance written last Winter, I feel it safe to say that we can expect another 18 months at the very least, of the NHS’s medical and psychological civil war:
‘As you enter our buildings you will go through one of our checkpoints. Please refrain from stopping to talk with people you may recognise as this will clutter the corridors of our hospitals and jeopardise the one-way system in place.’
We are human clutter being herded down the one-way road to collapse.
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