As thousands of students return to school this week, the question remains – when, and with what intensity, will the swine flu reemerge?
Schools are preparing by stocking buildings with tissues and hand sanitizer. And they’re instructing staff how to handle sick kids.
We wanted to know how area hospitals are planning.
Hospitals and clinics were caught off guard when the swine flu hit this past spring. This time they’re determined to be prepared.
So Dr. Michael Gutzeit says a core group at Children’s Hospital of Wisconsin has been working on its strategy for weeks. Gutzeit is Children’s chief medical officer.
“In fact last week we had what’s called a tabletop exercise where we actually walk through a scenario where we had increasing numbers of patients seeking care at our facility and really tested ourselves in terms of how would we respond to this, at this level and at the next tier, where we had even higher levels of patients,” Gutzeit says.
It’s normal for health care providers to compete, but Gutzeit says competitors are sitting down together to figure out what to do if the swine flu reaches pandemic levels.
“If let’s say, Children’s were overwhelmed with patients,” Gutzeit says.
Dr. Steve Cardamone is hoping he can steer patients to their primary care provider rather than into hospitals. He’s Wheaton Franciscan’s chief medical officer.
“As opposed to what we saw in the spring which was a larger than anticipated influx for example into our emergency department,” Cardamone says.
Cardamone and his colleagues recognize many people won’t want to wait until they can see their own doctor. Instead they’ll rush to clinics and emergency rooms.
Bruce Van Cleave says Aurora Health Care came up with individualized flu plans for its facilities.
“If it’s mild, we will do minimal things, if it turns out to be a larger one, we may need to add hours for our clinics. Certainly we’re stepping up training of all of our personnel, so that there’s no question about how they need to treat patients should they call or should they show up at the door,” Van Cleave says.
Michelle Peninger says part of Columbia St. Mary’s strategy is to make sure its employees don’t bring the virus to work. So it’s creating an online form to keep track of staff.
“If someone has called in sick with influenza-like symptoms, so that we can better manage employees absences and not having them come back to work before they have finished being ill or if they’ve had an exposure. So instead of just having 900 pieces of yellow sticky notes, we’re trying to put it into a format that can be dumped into a spread sheet and we can better manage that,” Peninger says.
Peninger says if cases of the H1N1 virus begin to rise, Columbia St. Mary’s might monitor everyone who walks in the door – even people visiting family.
“We’ll have triggers that cause us to go to more stringent management at the entrances in terms of who we allow in the building and who we won’t. For example, if you’re sick, if you’re not a patient, you need to go home,” Peninger says.
She says the hospital might have to turn away anyone who’s coughing or sneezing.
Peninger says she’d rather air on the side of caution. Susan Bence……
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