Tel Aviv hospital to keep African migrants from visiting patients
Director cites recent incident which highlighted threat of infectious disease from illegal population
Tel Aviv’s Sourasky Medical Center will no longer allow African migrants into the hospital as visitors, the head of the hospital announced on Monday.
Director general Gabi Barbash released a letter to the hospital staff on Monday morning outlining a new set of policies designed to deal with the Africans living in Israel after a rash of infectious diseases were discovered among the migrant population.
The rules are intended to protect patients and hospital staff, he said.
The new guidelines include mandatory chest x-rays for all African migrants who require hospitalization, preparing special isolation areas to treat African women and children, and barring visitation to the hospital, also known as Ichilov, to African migrants.
“I expect these measures will cause some discomfort, and possibly even criticism,” Barbash wrote in his letter. “But I am determined to prevent any risk to our staff and to our Israeli patients, who deserve protection from exposure to any undiagnosed infectious diseases.”
Women giving birth and their newborn babies as well as children of African migrants and refugees will be treated in separate isolated wards, away from the general population. The women will have to undergo a chest x-ray before being admitted to the hospital, and their husbands will be allowed to visit, but only after submitting to a chest x-ray and being declared by the hospital free of any infectious disease. Parents of children who are hospitalized will also need to have chest x-rays and be cleared for entry into the hospital. Parents and husbands whose chest x-rays show that they are not carrying any infectious disease will be issued identification bracelets enabling them to enter the hospital.
Barbash said that the staff of the pediatric intensive care was unknowingly exposed to a woman and her young child who suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis about three weeks ago. As a result, Barbash said, the hospital was forced to conduct a very extensive follow-up on every staff member who had contact with the woman and the child, as well as the 100 or so other patients with whom those staff members had been in contact.
“The incident made it painfully clear that we cannot predict or confine the danger of the transmission of infectious diseases from the population of migrant workers and refugees to the Israeli citizens who need our services,” wrote Barbash in his statement.
