Wednesday, 9 March 2022

COVID-19

Ms STALEY (Ripon) (19:12): (6260) My adjournment is to the Minister for Health, and the action I seek is that he issues clear guidelines to all Victorian public hospitals to enable patients to receive visitors in a consistent way. I was contacted yesterday by a constituent from Ararat who writes:

How is it fair that those of us that are triple vaxed, rapid antigen tested … are still denied access to our loved ones in hospitals around this state.

We’ve done everything that has been asked by our government and still Victorians are dying alone in hospital or having major treatments like chemo and in hossy radiation, with their distraught loved ones denied access to share this precious and often shortened time with them.

I am so very horrified that this is happening in our beautiful state.

Surely families deserve better than this.

The woman goes on to say:

I have been told that individual hospitals set their own rules …

Surely we as a community are better than this.

So my request is that we have some consistent guidelines for all hospitals, so that we no longer have a situation where particularly people at end of life are dying alone.