The world is mental!

[B00]

Anyone else seen this?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/west_yorkshire/4284522.stm

We truly live in a bonkers age!

[Piper-AK]

That is absolutely brilliant.  I can hardly type for laughing.  I love the 'Cooing should be a thing of the past'.  And she's serious.  Now I know why I always felt so alone, so traumatised - it's 'cause I was looked at when I was two days old.

[B00]

Its almost like an April fool innit? Except them silly sods are carrying it out!

[goldenboy]

i was going to raise this as a question as it was a headline in the metro. im with the hospital on this one. my mum works in a scubu unit of a london hospital and earlier this year my son was born and had to spend the first week of his life in a special care baby unit. having had to endure children running around screaming and banging into equipment in the ward as well as other parents who i did not know, i got pretty paranoid about my child being infected. its all ok if it were only cooing, but to be honest, most people cant resist a prod and a stroke. i child in a special care unit doesnt need this risk. the headline has been written from a point of view that seems to be having a pop at our nanny state and not from medical reasons

[B00]

That's my main point here goldenboy (your son well now I hope?)

I'm all for them using preventaive measures against infections, but banning cooing? from devoted friends and families who've waited 9 long months for this little miracle? That's gotta be a joke!

[goldenboy]

the boys fine now, we've just tried him on his first solids and he's not sold on the idea. i agree cooings fine, but in the mood we were in when he was in the hospital, the worry about not being able to take your kid home, and the paranoia about infections can make you a bit humourless when you should really be the opposite, and some of the stories that my mums told me about scubu can make your hair curl. the managers statement about the cooing and the human rights side of it is generally the only thing that people will remember when they're using it as an excuse to bash the nhs in later months, or years.

[kaktus]

That it sort of the problem isn't it goldenboy? I mean the managers statements. It seems ridiculous until you come to the last part of the article! The hospital should have worded it quite differently , as the reasons for why they're doing it is sensible. I mean, it seems quite bonkers that you can't say "helllooooo baby" in your most silly voice!

ps. I still think her statements are ridiculous but the idea probably isn't ridicolous and when I look at Pipers post I can't help laughing too.

pps. I'm happy to hear you boy is fine now goldenboy. Best wishes x

[Loosehead]

Well they probably hired a Human rights cooing outreach diversity consultant out of the Guardian for 90k a year and this was his first peice of work! That's where the NHS budget goes, doctors and nurses are last on the hiring list!

[bloodycheap]

Madness. It never did us any harm when we were babies.......this country needs to give itself a bloody shake and stop going OTT with almost everything nowadays. I suppose OTT is what keeps some of these people in jobs.

[littleoldme]

If someone cooed and gurgled at me, I wouldn't think they were infringing my human rights. I'd think they were mad. But then I am 36.

Love that boxed quote from Pej of London, too :-)

[boobesque]

i can understand when it comes to scbu units as my son spent 2 months there, and no kids or non-family were allowed in anyway.

But with normal wards i think thats madness as long as the visitors are told to wash their hands.

The only time i found cooing annoying was when callum came out of hospital he only weighed 4lb and we couldnt go anywhere, as soon as someone spotted us people went crazy cos he was so tiny! (one lady told my mum i was too old to carry a dolly!)

[metagirl]

i couldn't believe it when I saw this, but if in actuality the hospital nursery wards are so unprotected that strangers can cough on and stroke the babies, well, then so be it!

sorry to be fiddly, but in the USA, all babies in the nursery are housed behind a thick glass so people can see the babies and coo til their hearts content but they can't get close enough to touch them! that just seems dangerous! not just in regards to infection but kidnapping!

[Trillipse]

if people had avoided speaking to me until now, i would be rather upset. but uninfringed.

[hopalong]

They've got to be kidding

[tell-me-more]

New-born babies and their mothers deserve a bit of respect and peace and quiet, just like everyone else, young and old, whether in hospital, or outside.

Why - as Linda Riordan and Pej respectively suggest - should mothers and new-born babies have to fight for these rights? Give them a break! One's just given birth, and the other's just been born.

The onus is on visitors to be sensitive to patients' rights and to respect them. It sounds to me as though they weren't and they didn't and that's resulted in the admittedly over-the-top ban.

I agree with the neo-natal manager; prodding babies like tins in a supermarket shouldn't happen and babies should indeed be recognised as people with the same rights as you or me.

That, I think, should have been the focus of the article. The truly bonkers aspect of this story is that instead, our public service broadcaster has yet again resorted to sensationalist journalism.

We rarely seem to get straight news reports any more. It all seems to have to conform to a sensationalist formula - e.g. "The French are a bunch of smelly, lazy, arrogant f*ckwits; (pause for dramatic effect) That's the finding of [an unimaginably insignificant survey].

In the 80s, we used to find out who a quote was from beforehand, e.g. "The Foreign Office has issued advice not to travel to Ulan Bator". Now, it's more like "DON'T GO TO ULAN BATOR; that's the advice issued by the Foreign Office".

I blame Huw Ed-wards. I'm sure he started that irritating trend.