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Hours were tightened after Sars outbreak in 2003
 ONE hospital has only a four-hour window for visitors.
Another limits the number of visitors to four each time.
Are hospitals here too strict with their visiting hours?
The New Paper recently received complaints that hospital visiting hours were too restrictive.
A 40-year-old translator, who requested anonymity, said her husband, 45, was hospitalised for pneumonia and blood in his stools atTan Tock Seng Hospital (TTSH) last month.
She wanted to inform doctors doing their morning rounds that he also needed medication for gout, diabetes and bipolar disorder.
But TTSH’s visiting hours, she noticed from signs, are only in the afternoon.
She claimed that she told a hospital employee about her husband’s other medication, but he still ended taking more than his usual 1,000mg dosage of lithium for his bipolar condition on May 28.
She blamed the strict visiting hours for her not being able to inform the doctors in the morning.
But a TTSH spokesman said there was no overdose. He said the wife had not informed the hospital that she had given medication to her husband, and that 1,200mg, and not 1,600mg, of lithium was given in total.
Lonely
Associate Professor Tan Jam Chin, head of the department of general medicine, said the total dosage was still under the recommended daily dose of 1,800mg.
A laboratory technician, who wanted to be known only as Mr Kumaran, 30, said his father, 61, was warded at the Changi General Hospital(CGH) last month for pneumonia.
The elderly man was lonely because his family could not visit him in the mornings.
CGH’s visiting hours are from noon to 2pm and from 5pm to 9pm. Mr Kumaran could visit his father only in the evening after work but would have liked to visit in the morning before work.
Hospital visiting hours were tightened and more strictly enforced in the last seven years after the Sars outbreak.
Most public hospitals did away with the morning visiting hours, allowing visitors only later in the day after doctors have made their morning rounds.
This helps hospital staff to focus on patient care in the mornings without being interrupted, said two public hospitals.
.A CGH spokesman said: “It is important to have stipulated visiting hours because a constant stream of visitors to the ward can be disruptive to a patient’s rest. It also disturbs other patients sharing the same cubicle.”
Singapore General Hospital (SGH) said about 9,000 people visit its 1,500 in-patients every day.
Its director of operations, Mr Loh Yong Ho, said many of its patients suffer from high-risk medical conditions and are highly susceptible to infection. Hence, the need for visitor restrictions.
Some hospitals said they do exercise discretion.
At KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital (KKH), all paediatric inpatients and mothers in labour are allowed one visitor throughout the day.
Its chief operating officer, Mr Tan Jack Thian, said: “Flexibility for visitation by close family members is extended on a case-by-case basis.”
A-class wards
Visiting-hour policies are usually applied across the board in all hospitals regardless of ward category.
But at TTSH, A-class wards have longer visiting hours, from 9am to 9pm, because A-class patients have their own rooms, which contains the risk of infection, its spokesman said.
Private hospitals have more flexible visiting hours. At Parkway Health’s three hospitals – Mount Elizabeth, Gleneagles and Parkway East – the visiting hours can stretch for 12-hour blocks.
They declined to comment on their longer visiting hours but it could be that they have fewer patients than public hospitals.
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