MANATEE — Manatee Memorial Hospital and Lakewood Ranch Medical Center are asking parents to refrain from taking children to visit patients because young people run a higher risk of contracting and spreading swine flu.
The hospitals will post signs as early as today encouraging those younger than 18 to stay away from lobbies and patient rooms, according to Vernon DeSear, Manatee Memorial’s vice-president of marketing and business development.
DeSear said the hospitals are following the lead of many other medical centers across the country. A Sarasota Memorial Hospital spokeswoman said that facility will ban child visitors from its mother-baby units — obstetrics, neonatal intensive care and pediatrics — beginning Monday.
A representative from Blake Medical Center did not return a message left Thursday.
Manatee Memorial and Lakewood Ranch Medical Center stopped short of banning children from the hospitals completely, DeSear said.
“Our initial assessment, as we heard of other hospitals putting in mandatory rules, we felt we needed to be a hospital that looked at that decision as one of being more accommodating,” DeSear said.
“To put a blanket decision in place like that was a little bit too specific. So what we wanted to do was say our preference would be for the well-being of our patients that if you’re under the age of 18 you should really stay at home at this difficult time.”
Hospital officials are worried children may carry the H1N1 or other seasonal flu virus into the hospital and infect patients who may not be able to fight off the flu.
Their still-developing hygiene habits and close contact with other young people and adults leave children vulnerable to the flu.
“The challenge that we have is that the children that are in the waiting area might not be sick. But the whole family comes in because they have nowhere to put their children,” said Loretta McManus, the emergency room nursing manager at Manatee Memorial.
Meanwhile, the number of patients complaining of flu-like symptoms continues to increase.
Manatee Memorial has seen a marked jump in emergency room visits by Level 4 patients, whom the hospital defines as non-urgent cases that require just one medical service such as a test or X-ray.
Flu patients fall into the Level 4 category.
In September, the hospital logged a 16.2 percent increase in Level 4 cases, according to Linda McBride Antes, the emergency services director.
There had been a 10 percent increase in October, through Wednesday, with three days remaining in the month.
The Sarasota Memorial spokeswoman said her hospital has seen a 10 to 20 percent increase this fall in flu-related visits to the emergency room.
McBride Antes attributed Manatee Memorial’s increase to an influx of patients complaining of flu-like symptoms. She said many of the cases did not require an emergency room visit.
“We don’t want to discourage people from seeking emergency care, especially those who are getting sicker or have co-morbidities or are pregnant,” McBride Antes said. “On the other hand, if your first thought is to come to the ER, that’s not the right approach.”
Emergency room staff said that so far the hospital has been able to handle the additional traffic.
“We’ve been managing our flow pretty well. We’ve been setting up process improvement initiatives to manage flow better,” McManus said.
The hospital has created a plan for handling an epidemic should the number of flu-related cases continue to increase — and officials fear it could as snowbirds arrive and weather changes.
Swine-flu patients could be quarantined in a back area of the emergency waiting room and enter and exit through a separate door.
But emergency room staff physician Dr. Tim Blend encouraged people who are suffering from standard flu-like symptoms to consult their primary doctors before visiting the ER.
Some other patients are confusing common cold symptoms with flu symptoms, Blend said.
The major differences are that body aches, fever, dry cough and mild headaches usually accompany a flu, but not a cold, he said.
“Use common sense,” Blend said. “Do what you might do for a fever and cold or flu symptoms: rest, plenty of fluids, relieve stress, don’t infect others.
“If you’re not better in two or three days, you might want to call your doctor. ...
“If you think you have a cold or the flu, it probably is. But you don’t need to run out until you really feel incapacitated.”
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