In line with national guidance, our infection prevention control guidelines and hospital visiting guidance remain in place for all staff and visitors in order to prevent Covid 19 transmission within our hospitals. Across our hospital sites, there has been no change to our current Infection Prevention and Control (IPC) measures or visiting re-strictions. We continue to maintain best IPC practice across all areas of the hospital sites, not just wards and clinics, in line with nation-al guidance. Staff, patients, and visitors will be expected to continue to follow social distancing rules when visiting any care setting as well as using face coverings, mask, and other personal pro-tection equipment. You can help by ensuring that you help play your part when visiting NHS and care settings to help protect our staff and patients, particularly those who may be more vulnerable to infections. As a Trust, we are supporting the nation-al #NotTooMuchToMask campaign which aims to encourage us all to continue to be cautious, despite lockdown and legal re-strictions being lifted. The campaign focuses on asking everyone to continue to wear face-masks when in public, maintain good hand hygiene, keep areas well ventilated and to meet outside where possible, to un-dertake contract tracing and of course to take up the offer of both doses of the vaccination. We are pleased to announce that whilst visiting restrictions are still in place, we are now enabling some visiting at St Peter’s, which is being managed in a controlled manner. Any patients who have a registered carer may have a daily visit of up to 1 hour. This includes the patient groups of learning difficulties and severe dementia. Remaining Adult inpatients may have 3 visits per week for 1 hour and this will be one visitor only per session, but it can be a different per-son each time. No children or babies will be allowed.
Children’s wards, maternity, A&E and ITU are managing the situation locally as high-lighted in our roadmap, see roadmap picture above or visit our website for further infor-mation www.ashfordstpeters@nhs.net If you would like to visit, please book a timeslot via our visitors booking line –01932 723318. This is a dedicated telephone line and will be manned Monday to Friday between 9.30am – 4pm and Saturday and Sunday be-tween 10am – 4pm. If you need to book a visit outside of these hours, please call the ward directly. To visit Wordsworth and Chaucer wards at Ashford Hospital please contact the wards directly. Alternatively, if you’d like to enquire about a loved one please phone 01784 884488. This situation will be constantly reviewed and further visiting changes may occur depending on Covid incidence within our community and also transmission rates. We would like to thank all patients and visi-tors for their support, patience, and co-operation in adhering to these restrictions and measures.