Repeatedly denied the chance to see her dying father, Chigusa Suzuki has been railing against strict visitation policies that are convenient for hospitals.

These restrictions often leave patients to die alone and deny grieving families their final moments together.

While grappling with the death of a loved one is difficult for anybody, Suzuki has been going through the additional agony of knowing her father reached the end of his life in February in a Tokyo hospital alone.

He had no relatives around his deathbed, despite his family’s desperate pleas.

Suzuki, who lives in the United States, was blocked from seeing him by his hospital’s strict, pandemic-era visitation policy that the facility maintained even after the threat level of COVID-19 was officially downgraded.

Suzuki arrived in Japan on Feb. 3 to go straight from the airport to the hospital to see her father for the last time.

However, the hospital rejected her petition.

She had not been allowed to see him either during a previous trip she had hastily made a few weeks earlier, in January, because of the hospital’s total ban on visitors.

Suzuki said that Japan’s current health care system is “too cold” and called for legislation designed to protect the rights of patients and their families.

“Clearly, the tasks of limiting the exposure to the coronavirus and handling visitor-related work are easier for hospitals if they retain strict visitation rules,” she said. “But I don’t think that policies excessively separating patients and their families are appropriate and sound.” 

When the pandemic started in the spring of 2020, the health ministry advised medical facilities and nursing homes to temporarily ban visitors, except in emergency cases.

Most facilities followed this advice to take the utmost precautions.

But in October 2023, the ministry revised its recommendation after the government downgraded the classification of COVID-19 to the lowest alert level for infectious diseases, the same category as influenza, in May that year.

The ministry’s updated advisory called for hospitals and nursing homes to allow visits as much as possible, balancing the importance of in-person communication with reasonable measures to contain the virus.

Many facilities, however, have been reluctant to return to their pre-pandemic visitor policies after being granted broader discretion during the public health crisis.

Suzuki’s father’s health declined several years ago. He began to show symptoms similar to those of senile dementia and suffered frequent falls.

When examined at a university hospital in January 2023, he was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy, an incurable disease caused by damage to brain cells that control vital functions—including movement, walking, balance and swallowing.

The doctor told Suzuki’s family that the disease progresses over time and that her father would eventually become bedridden.

In August that year, he fell from a chair at a day care center that he frequented, and suffered a compression fracture in his spine.

He was transferred to a hospital, where he stayed for several months.

The hospital, a midsize facility with nearly 500 beds, has been designated by the Tokyo metropolitan government as an emergency care provider.

The hospital’s visitation policy was a restrictive one. Visits were allowed just once a week for 15 minutes, which family members were required to schedule in advance.

Suzuki said that each time her mother went to see her father, a staff member brought him in a wheelchair to a room on his ward.

After just 15 minutes, the staffer would say “time’s up” and take her father back to his room.

Coordinating her work schedule, Suzuki managed to return to Japan for nine days in October last year.

During that time, the hospital policy would have only allowed her to see her father 30 minutes in total, split between two visits.

Prior to Suzuki’s trip to Japan, her mother petitioned the hospital for a special exemption to give her daughter extra visitation time, since she was traveling all the way from the United States to see him.

The hospital refused.

Suzuki’s father stayed in the hospital for about three months to undergo rehabilitation, but never regained the ability to walk.

He moved into a home for the elderly when he was released from the hospital.

Suzuki’s family was relieved to find that the home did not impose any restrictions on visitation.

However, the family’s peace of mind did not last long.

The father’s disease progressed during the hospitalization. Soon, he became unable to swallow food.

When he developed a high fever, he was taken to another hospital on Jan. 9.

This hospital, with less than 100 beds, had a strict no-visitation policy.

Given his symptoms, Suzuki feared that her father was approaching the end of his life.

When the hospital arranged a meeting with a doctor to explain the father’s condition to her family on Jan. 18, Suzuki flew back to Japan to attend it.

Afterward, Suzuki pleaded with the doctor to be allowed to see her father.

“I returned to Japan just to make it to this meeting,” Suzuki told the doctor. “Please let me see my father.”

But the doctor said the hospital made no exceptions to their visitor policy, leaving her no choice but to return to the United States without seeing her father.

On Feb. 1, the hospital contacted her family to inform them that his condition had deteriorated and that they would be allowed to visit him as a “special case.”

When Suzuki’s mother and elder sister arrived at the hospital, the father was staring blankly, unable to speak.

They returned to the hospital the following day. The father, however, was asleep.

Suzuki returned to Japan on Feb. 3 to see her father one last time, only to be denied permission to see him because the hospital “had already granted visits two days in a row to her family as a special case.”

Two hours after she got to her parents’ home, the hospital called her family to say that her father probably only had five to 10 minutes to live.

She rushed to the hospital, but her father had died about 10 minutes before she arrived.

The Asahi Shimbun requested an interview with representatives at the two hospitals to clarify their reasons for maintaining restrictive visitation policies.

Both hospitals declined the request.

The websites of the 14 hospitals affiliated with Tokyo’s metropolitan government show that visitation rules vastly differ from one facility to the next.

One hospital says 15-minute visits are allowed between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m., while another has no restrictions on visitors from 8 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Hospital Organization, which manages the 14 facilities, said the ban on visits has been gradually eased after the COVID-19 pandemic came under control.

An official with the organization explained that differing visitation polices reflect differences in the hospitals’ specialty fields, the distinct patient groups they care for, and the size of hospital rooms and medical equipment.

“They devise their visitation rules based on their circumstances while prioritizing measures to protect patients and health care workers,” the official said.

Still, Suzuki’s distress over the hospitals’ restrictive visitation policies resonates with many other families.

Ikuko Yamaguchi, director of Sasaeai Iryo Jinken Center COML, a nonprofit group that advocates for better communication between patients and health care professionals, noted that her organization has received numerous complaints about medical facilities’ rigid visitor rules even after COVID-19 was downgraded.

“Society has largely returned to normalcy, as is shown by the end of the mask mandate,” she said. “But when it comes to visitation policies, there is a huge disparity between different hospitals.”

She said the discrepancies largely stem from the different perspectives of the health care professionals in charge of virus control measures at each hospital.

Yamaguchi also noted that while large facilities are well equipped to contain potential coronavirus outbreaks, that is not the case with smaller hospitals.

In addition, she said she suspects that some medical facilities are hesitant to end their restrictive visitation rules because the hospitals themselves have experienced easier operations during the ban, free from the watchful eyes of visitors.

“We are not arguing for the complete removal of the ban, given the possibility of a hospital-based (coronavirus) resurgence, but facilities can take a more flexible approach based on circumstances,” Yamaguchi said. “Medical facilities need to address situations in which the rights of patients and families have been ignored.”