The emergency room visits from this season’s flu outbreak are higher than any in more than a decade, so much that area hospitals lack the beds to help many victims.
www.eagletimes.com
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Flu puts strain on hospitals | February 17, 2018 By PATRICK ADRIAN padrian@eagletimes.com The emergency room visits from this season’s flu outbreak are higher than any in more than a decade, so much that area hospitals lack the beds to help many victims. Hospitals across the region report having received or transferred flu patients needing hospital beds to other emergency rooms due to a shortage of available beds. Last week, hospitals nationwide reported approximately 8.1 percent of total emergency room visits — about 79,125 patients — were for influenza-related illnesses, according to Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. The last time numbers were remotely that high was October 2009, when emergency rooms documented 69,068 flu cases. The ineffectiveness of this year’s flu vaccine has been severe, explained Blythe Kersula, infection prevention specialist for Springfield Hospital in Vermont. More problematic to hospitals is the impact this season’s flu strain, H3N2, has on the elderly population. If a patient with the flu resides in a nursing home, the hospital cannot discharge the patient because many nursing homes cannot receive infectious residents, explained Mike Barwell, media relations manager at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon. Springfield Hospital’s 25 beds have often been full since the spike in flu patients began last week, said Kersula. When they had beds available, they were accepting patients from other hospitals. Many of the hospitals in the region are only permitted to have a maximum of 25 beds, said Kersula, because they are “critical access hospitals.” Critical access hospitals were designated by Congress in 1997 to rural hospitals that allowed them to retain operational funding. The 25-bed limit is a condition to that agreement. Other critical-access hospitals in the region include Valley Regional Hospital in Claremont, Alice Day Peck Memorial Hospital in Lebanon and New London Hospital in New London. Even hospitals with a large capacity have had to find beds elsewhere. Kersula said Springfield accepted one patient from Dartmouth-Hitchcock, a facility licensed to hold 396 beds. “It’s the first time I recall that happening (here),” Kersula said. Barwell said that Dartmouth-Hitchcock currently does have capacity but acknowledged a lot of taxing on their bed availability during this past week. Some of that was because Dartmouth-Hitchcock receives such a volume of critical and emergency care patients from the region’s hospitals, whether flu-related or not. Health care providers say that H3 viruses typically result in higher hospitalizations because they predominantly affect populations with the weakest immune systems, including adults 65 or older and children under 5. This season’s H3 virus has also targeted many adults in their 40s and 50s, said Kersula, particularly those with other health issues, such as smoking. Causes for hospitalization include dehydration, difficulty breathing or development of conditions such as pneumonia, said Kersula.
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