Can we as a society cope with more relaxed visitation hours at hospitals?

Hospitals struggle daily to manage visitation hours. Relatives and friends of patients in general do not seem to mind the stipulated hours. This is not only causing immense stress to staff but more importantly adversely affecting the rest of patients.

There are very good reasons why visitation hours at hospitals are enforced - patients need rest for their recovery.

There are also very good reasons why visitations should be allowed as well. Evidence suggest that patients recover better when social support is available through the presence of loved ones and are cheered up in their recovery process while in a very stressful environment of the hospital. The CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston had a post recently where he advocated that hospitals should consider being more friendly for ICU visitation and had a team going to see how it may be done.

In fact, one public hospital in Singapore has recently decided to extend their evening visitation hours by one hour to end at 9pm instead of the usual 8pm. The question is - should we follow suit? This was discussed recently in the hospital and we have decided to stick to the current visitation hours that end at 8pm because we believe that if we were to extend the hours to 9pm, by the time visitors cleared out of the hospital, it would be 11pm - way too late for some patients.

There are always 2 camps on the issue of whether hospitals enforce visitation hours strictly. One camp is with the hospital - patients need rest and hence the hours should be enforced strictly. The other camp is that patients need visitors but visitors have other commitments and should be allowed to visit whenever they want.

The question is: as a society do we have the grace to ensure patient's restfulness if hospitals were to relax visitation hours. To do so, it means to take turns to be by the patients bedside in small groups so that the place is not too crowded and noisy. It means to limit the duration of each visitation. To exercise control on the behavior of children so that they do not spoil the peace of patients rest. To self regulate when the crowd and noise level at patient bedside is close to threshold. To gracefully accept it when patients decline visitors?

I hope at some point the answer will be a YES.