BECKLEY, WV (WOAY) – Beckley ARH has announced new changes to its visitation policies that began this Friday.
Jeri Knowlton, Marketing Manager with ARH, says that since last April, families and friends of patients have been unable to visit their loved ones in the hospital due to the risks associated with the pandemic. And now after 10 months of that police, the hospital has now reopened visitation.
“Today we opened up visitation,” Knowlton said. It still has some parameters around it, but still we’re able to open up visitation to allow people to come back in.”
In April, West Virginia was seeing an average of about 30 cases per day, and that slowly rose over the coming months. However, average cases have slowly started to drop and the hospital sees this as a good opportunity to reopen visitation.
“What we’re seeing is hospitalizations are down, the COVID positivity is down, the daily cumulative rate is down, and those vaccinations have gone up. So it’s the right time to bring visitation back.”
There are still safety precautions in place. Everyone is required to wear a mask and social distancing is still encouraged. The hospital believes that with these precautions, patients can see their families again in a safe way.
“Visitation, family and friends, bringing back that bedside care is so important to the healing process. And we’re just glad that we’re finally at a place where we’re able to do that.”
There are still some restrictions on visitation for emergency room and behavioral health patients.
