The Alabama Senate has passed a bill to allow hospital and nursing home patients to designate an “essential caregiver” who would be ensured visitation rights.

The bill, which passed 33-0, comes in response to the restrictions on visitation that kept people separated from their family members during the COVID-19 pandemic. It would repeal existing law on hospital visitation policies and require hospitals and other health care facilities to adopt new visitation policies that meet certain standards.

Among those standards is that they would allow the essential caregiver designated by the patient to visit at least two hours a day in addition to any other visitation allowed by the facility. The patient could rotate the essential caregiver, picking a different one for each day. If a patient is incapacitated and could not appoint an essential caregiver, a family member could appoint one for them.

Also, the hospital and nursing home policies would have to allow visitation under specific circumstances. Those include:

• End-of-life situations.
• Patients who were living with family before being admitted and are struggling with the change in environment and lack of in-person family support.
• Patients who are making one or more major medical decisions.
• Patients who are experiencing emotional distress or grieving the loss of a friend or family member who recently died.
• Patients who need cueing or encouragement to eat or drink which was previously provided by a family member or caregiver.
• Patients who used to talk and interact with others who are seldom speaking.
• Childbirth, including labor and delivery.
• Pediatric patients.

The sponsor of the bill, Sen. Garlan Gudger, R-Cullman, said every family in Alabama has a story about separation from loved ones during the pandemic. Gudger said his bill was not meant as a criticism of health care facilities or their employees.

“They are the heroes to everybody I know,” Gudger said. “Those are the people who were on the front lines.”

The bill was named after Harold Sachs, longtime chief of staff with the Alabama Republican Party, who died in November 2020, and Anne Roberts, who died in March 2022 and was the wife of Sen. Dan Roberts of Mountain Brook.

Gudger said Sachs’ wife, Bonnie Sachs, inspired him to sponsor the bill because of what she told him about the separation from her husband before his death.

The bill moves to the House of Representatives.

Alabama and national politics.