Updated Visiting Restrictions 4th March 2022

Your Child is An Inpatient

Two parents/guardians (without symptoms of COVID-19) will be issued with Visiting Cards when their child is admitted and must present the cards to gain entry to the hospital. Both parents/guardians are allowed to be with their child at the same time during their hospital stay.

Your Child is Attending our Emergency Department, Outpatients or Day Case Settings

To protect our patients/parents/guardians and staff only one parent/guardian without symptoms of COVID 19 will be allowed to be with their child during their hospital visit/appointment to ED, OPD or Day Care. Unfortunately due to space limitations in these settings, we are unable to facilitate two parents/guardians at the same time.

Exceptions will always be considered as previous, under compassionate or special circumstances.

Please do not attend if you have any symptoms of COVID-19, are a close contact or are awaiting a COVID-19 swab result. All visitors must wear a face mask at all times. Siblings are not able to visit and there is a robust Visitor Card system in place. While we understand that these measures will be difficult for some families, our priority is the safety of all CHI patients, families and staff.

The Visiting Guidelines at Children’s Health Ireland (CHI) at Crumlin, have been developed to protect your child, your family and other visitors.  Please ask your relatives and friends to comply with the Guidelines.

From January 1 – February 20 2022: (these numbers are approximate and do not include COVID positives for surgeries or day cases)

236 children/young people admitted to CHI with COVID-19.

29 of these admissions were incidental COVID-19 findings.

Admissions to ICU of children with COVID was very low, we cannot report publicly on these numbers.

Dr Allan Goldman, Chief Medical Officer of CHI welcomed the changes.

“Its wonderful to have a sense of normality restored and our staff are delighted to see things changing – its hoped parents with inpatient children will get much needed respite. We have been very fortunate across CHI, experiencing low numbers of virus and less severe COVID illness in our patients, than other hospital groups. However, we do have a vulnerable population of young patients who are unvaccinated due to their age, and so the need for some visiting restrictions does remain.”