Health Care Workers Calling in Sick - WI
Updated: Oct 14, 2009 7:11 PM EDT
By Sarah Thomsen
Prevea says it’s never seen anything like this — hundreds of people every day coming in to clinics with the flu.
Now health care workers are getting sick, forcing Prevea to hire more doctors just to keep up.
When you go to the doctor, the first person to great you is the patient services representative. Now people like Judy are the ones getting sick. Tuesday 20 of her coworkers stayed home.
“We have a lot of staff members having to go home or not come in because they’re running fevers,” Dr. Ashok Rai, Prevea president/CEO, said.
“It’s tough, supply versus demand. Right now the demand is really high right now and supply is even getting sick.”
Prevea is seeing so many patients and sick health care workers, they’re bringing in temporary providers and hiring more doctors.
“We were planning on it anyway because we’re a growing company so we have more and more volumes, but right now in areas I’m kind of re-shuffling providers to kind of meet the demand,” Rai said.
Prevea says it’s seeing record numbers of patients with the flu or similar viruses needing to be seen, especially in pediatrics and urgent care.
To give you an idea just how busy Prevea has been, at just one urgent care location the health care workers treated 130 patients in an eight-hour period.
“And wait times are a little longer than they are. We don’t want anybody to ever have to wait, but right now with the amount of illness, it is very bad,” Rai said.
Wednesday Prevea was giving out its first H1N1 shots to health care workers, hoping to keep them as healthy as possible so they’re ready and able to treat other sick patients.
http://www.wbay.com/Global/story.asp?S=11316397
2nd H1N1 Death Reported In Johnson County
Woman Had No Other Health Problems, Officials Say
POSTED: 6:10 pm CDT October 14, 2009
Kan. — The Johnson County Health Department has confirmed the county’s second H1N1-related death.
Officials said a 50-year-old woman with no previous health conditions has died from the virus. No other details have been revealed about the case.
Persons with questions regarding the H1N1 virus should call the Johnson County Flu Hotline during business hours, at 913-826-1263.
http://www.kctv5.com/news/21299282/detail.html
Yet they are still keeping schools in the area open. For the life of me I have no idea how or why. Every single family we know has at least one sick family member. It’s hitting this area pretty hard now, and the state was also hit hard back in the spring.