Hospitals crowded as flu hits

By MARTIN JOHNSTON and REBECCA WALSH health reporters

Hospitals have started overflowing as an influenza outbreak takes off and some patients have waited for 16 hours for admission to a ward.

Middlemore Hospital in South Auckland, North Shore Hospital and Waikato Hospital have all been extremely busy this week.

A surge of influenza has been blamed in South Auckland, where it it is estimated that more than one in every 300 people saw a GP for the respiratory disease last week.

Elsewhere, the big rise in patient numbers is attributed to everything from various breathing disorders to strokes.

At North Shore Hospital, 48 people, some of them on stretchers in corridors, were waiting at the emergency care centre yesterday morning for admission to a ward. Some waited 16 hours after being seen in the emergency care centre.

"It's a sudden peak which started at the end of last week," the hospital's operations manager, Angela Beckett, said last night.

The hospital is asking GPs to consider all other options before referring people to hospital.

North Shore and Waikato Hospitals have both postponed some elective surgery.

The Auckland District Health Board said its four hospitals had had some bad patches this winter but were not overcrowded yesterday.

The son of a 78-year-old woman who fell and broke a hip on Tuesday said she was receiving good care, but had to wait four hours to be x-rayed at North Shore Hospital.

She was transferred to Auckland Hospital but did not arrive in her ward until about 1.30am yesterday. In the wider Auckland region, last week was the second in a row in which the number of influenza cases rose. Doctors expect the trend to continue.

Based on reports from GPs in a surveillance programme, there were an estimated 123 people with influenza-like symptoms for every 100,000 people. In the winter of 2001, the figure peaked at just over 200.

South Auckland was worst hit last week, but a medical officer of health, Dr Nicholas Jones, said it was likely that many more people were sick than those who sought medical help. He estimated that only 10 per cent of people with the flu went to the doctor.

"We haven't had a big flu season like this for four years. I would be reluctant to say this looks like it's going to be it ... it could well be that this year we are in for a worse flu season than in the last few years."

He did not know why South Auckland was worst hit in the region, but said influenza spread more quickly in homes that were overcrowded. It also tended to start in younger populations with preschoolers and school pupils taking the illness home to their families.

Swab tests from patients indicated the illness was being caused by an influenza A virus similar to the Moscow strain.

Struggling hospitals

* North Shore Hospital: patients waiting up to 16 hours to be admitted to a ward

* Middlemore Hospital: emergency department averaging 250 patients a day; 190 is normal

* Waikato Hospital: emergency department seeing 150 to 180 patients a day; 120 is normal