subject: What To Do When Visiting Someone At The Hospital [print this page] So you know someone who is hospitalized, and you need to visit them. This can be a daunting thing because most of us aren't sure how to behave. This is because we don't visit people at the hospital much, unless we have a friend or family member with a serious illness.
As a visitor, you are probably coming to see a patient in order to cheer them up and make them feel better. If you don't follow certain guidelines, though, you can make the situation worse.
Someone who is hospitalized is likely very ill or very badly hurt. This can make us feel helpless, and sometimes people behave badly because they don't know how they should be acting.
We need to figure it out though, because it is important that we not make life harder for the patient. When you find yourself in this situation, the following tips may be helpful:
Keep your visit short in most cases. A half hour or less is best. Remember that your loved one may have other visitors they need to see also, so a half hour may be too long. You want to keep it to 10 or 15 minutes if you are one person of many. You don't want your visit to prove too tiring for your loved one, and you don't want the visitation to become too rowdy with too many people involved.
On the other hand, under some circumstances you may be able to stay longer. If you are the only person visiting, and the patient wants you to stay and can tolerate a lengthy visit, you can stay as long as you both are still enjoying the visit (to the limit of hospital policy of course).
It's not a good idea to discuss the patient's illness with them. If the patient wants to talk about nothing else, though, you should allow this.
Try "how do you feel" for an easy opening question. If you do this, it allows the patient the option to go into detail with their response, or to give you a short response that says "I don't want to go into it." If you get a one-word response, follow that as a clue that the person would prefer to talk about something else.
Be positive in your conversations. Negativity never helps. If the patient feels bad, or looks horrible, you don't have to point this out to them. They either already know, or would prefer not to know. Instead, be cheerful because this is what would most cheer them up.
