Tamworth coronavirus: visitor ban at Tamworth hospital keeps 'desperate' wife from husband with dementia

Roger Hope was admitted to the hospital on Thursday, after breaking his pelvis in a fall.

Wife, Ruth Hope, was initially asked by an "overworked and understaffed" hospital to help provide care for her husband. But on Saturday she was banned from entering the facility.

NSW Health announced the increased restrictions on visitation on Thursday, explaining it was in light of "increasing transmission rates with the emergence of the Omicron variant".

Hunter New England Health said there are visitor restrictions in place to protect the patients and staff, although officials are willing to look at every case on an individual basis.

A spokesperson said if anyone has a complaint then their case can be looked at.

Mrs Hope will be hoping to gain entry based off of the description given by NSW Health in regards to people who may be allowed to visit.

"Visitors will be permitted in some circumstances for essential patient needs and compassionate reasons, especially when supporting women in labour, providing care for children in hospital, and for palliative care," it stated on a social media post.

But for now Ms Hope is shut out and feels distraught about the situation.

"I was devastated," Mrs Hope said.

"I'm desperate and I'm still desperate. I feel like my child has been ripped away from me. I'm panicking, saying nobody is really able to look after him.

"They ring me and I know that they're just telling me platitudes. They're saying he's fine, we've spoken to him he's doing very well. I know very well he won't be. He'll be distressed. I'm the only person he's got knowledge of and contact with and I know he won't be okay, because I know him too well."

The retired university professor can't eat, walk, go to the toilet and can barely communicate. For four years, Mrs Hope has cared for him for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Every day he deteriorates, she said.

She fed him on Thursday and Friday, but when she came back on Saturday morning, she found the hospital locked up. She was eventually told she wasn't allowed back in. Unable to see her husband for two days, she fears the worst.

"He is incapable of his own personal hygiene. He has to be wiped and cleaned up. I don't know that they've got people that can stay with him to do that. I have no faith in it. I was willing to be there every day to do this and they're refusing to allow me in the door," she said.

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Mrs Hope was told that almost all visits to the hospital were banned.

The only exceptions are people visiting a family member doomed to die in the next 24 hours, partners of women about to have a baby and a support person for admitted children.

Patients with high-range dementia should be another exception, she said.

"I see his in the same category as a child who requires a person to be with him all the time. He can speak for himself, he can't even press the button to get a nurse," she said.

His wife said he would require a single nurse around the clock, every day, a level of care "no hospital" could provide.

He has only a few changes of clothes and Mrs Hope worries for his safety and mental state.

It will take at least six to eight weeks for him to recover from his broken pelvis, and there is no current end date for the increased hospital restrictions. It's possible they won't see each other before Christmas.

Mrs Hope said she hated going to the media, but did so in the name of several others she knew to be in the same boat; some in the same ward.

"The last thing he said to me before they took him away in the ambulance was 'don't let them put me in a nursing home', in his own little manner, in his own language," she said.

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