One of the rights of the hospitalized child says that children have the right to be accompanied by their parents or their replacement as long as possible during your stay in the hospital, without impeding the application of the necessary treatments for the child. However, so far, that right has been respected very little, especially in pediatric ICUs, where thousands of children have been alone for a long time.
Those thousands of children have thousands of parents, and many of them have led an almost titanic struggle to achieve something that seems logical: to spend more time with their children in the ICU, accompany them in the disease, take care of them. Today, July 23, finally, the Interterritorial Health Council will discuss the proposal included in the Childhood and Adolescence Plan of, among other things, extend visiting hours so parents can stay with their children as much as they want, without restrictions.
Watching over the company of the parents at all hours
The objective of the Plan is to try to establish criteria of treatment and services in hospitals that help children to recover better with the continuous support of their parents. This is undoubtedly a step forward, because until now it was considered in many centers that the role of parents became more a hindrance than an aid. To give a close example, my brother spent a lot of time in hospitals as a child and I remember that my mother was not going because they told her "You better not come, mommy. You start crying and your son sees you like this and you don't help him recover", something my mother regrets.
Perhaps other parents can give more current examples, with ICUs with tremendously restrictive visiting hours and children spending most of the day alone, such as at La Paz University Hospital, in Madrid, with visiting hours from 12:30 to 13:00 and from 19:30 to 20:00, that in my town they would value it as "to piss and not drop".
To date, each community did what it considered best
Until now it was each community that established the regulations to be followed in hospitals. However it seems that more than each autonomous community, each hospital made or fell as it seemed. The Spanish Federation of Parents of Children with Cancer (Fepnc) conducted a study to show the reality of 25 Spanish hospitals and saw that in only 10 of them the schedule was open to parents all day. In nine the visiting hours were between four and ten hours a day and in the rest, the remaining six, the time that parents could spend with their children was between three hours and an hour and a half.
Well, the Plan being discussed today proposes "Promote that the mother / father who wishes to be able to stay with her child 24 hours a day, and accompany her during the performance of painful and stressful medical tests in order to reduce her anxiety level, without interfering in professional work", that is to say, finally defend what the European Parliament collected 27 years ago.
Skin to skin contact in newborns
Another of the proposed measures is to promote skin-to-skin contact in newborns, promoting that baby and parents spend as much time as possible together. This is not new, we have already talked many times about it in Babies and more, and it seems that there are many, perhaps most, hospitals that have as protocol the premature contact between mother and baby.
Anyway, as you see finally someone has stopped to think for a little while about babies and children and their hospital stays and finally they can spend those bad times, because being in a hospital admitted is not a dish of good taste for anyone, and less for children, with their parents, the people who can give them more support, love and hugs, something that will help them, no doubt be better and heal before (and I say without a doubt because if in newborns the skin-to-skin contact of the Mother Kangaroo Method works wonders, what will it not do when the children are older).
