Healthcare Equality Index: Visitation Policies
HRC's National Healthcare Equality Index allows facilities to assess themselves on best practices in LGBT patient-centered care, including visitation policies. Learn more about participating in the HEI survey and review HEI resources below.
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Revisiting Your Hospital's Visitation Policy: Implementing the New CMS and Joint Commission Inclusive Visitation Requirements (PDF) (AHLA & HRC, 2012)
New regulations from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) went into effect in January 2011 requiring hospitals to permit patients to designate visitors of their choosing and also prohibit discrimination in visitation based on sexual orientation and gender identity. As an organization with CMS-deeming authority, The Joint Commission aligned its hospital standards to these new HHS requirements, effective July 2011. This resource from AHLA and HRC will assist hospitals in revising their visitation policies to satisfy these revised standards.
Implementing LGBT-Inclusive Visitation Policies
Visitation by family and friends is important to a patient’s healing process. Visitors should be a welcomed part of patient treatment. Healthcare facilities are faced with the challenge of striking a balance between the patient’s much-needed support from visitors and the healthcare and privacy needs of the patient and others. To achieve this balance, healthcare facilities implement visitation policies that outline protocol around patient visitation. These policies can be facility-wide or specific to a unit and often include parameters around who is permitted to visit and when. Visitation access is often determined by a facility’s definition of family. Same-sex partners and same-sex parents are not always recognized as family due to inadequate visitation policies and staff training.
Healthcare facilities must ensure that their visitation policies are inclusive of the LGBT community. Depending on a healthcare facility’s existing policy design and preferences, there are several ways in which visitation policies can be made inclusive of the LGBT community:
- Include explicitly inclusive definition of “family” within their existing stand-alone visitation policy.
- Incorporate this explicitly inclusive definition of “family” into existing stand-alone visitation policy by direct reference to a companion “definitions” policy section.
- Including explicit reference to equal access for same-sex couples and same-sex parents within the facility's visitation policy.
- Prohibiting discrimination in visitation access based on "sexual orientation" and "gender identity" within the facility's visitation policy.
Visitation Policies and Definition of Family
Many visitation policies establish a definition of permitted visitors and then enumerate specific restrictions on an otherwise general grant of visitor access. Delineating permitted visitors is typically achieved through a definition of “family.” This definition is used to establish the parameters for permitted visitors and enumerate any specific restrictions for security, health, and operational concerns. It is essential to the equal treatment of LGBT individuals that healthcare institutions adopt an explicitly LGBT-inclusive definition of “family.”
