Seasonal Illnesses Overwhelm Local Hospitals

Ventura County hospitals are filled with patients suffering from influenza, respiratory ailments and stomach bugs, causing emergency room backups and forcing critical care patients to wait for beds.

The problem is so bad that several times last week, a few hospitals took turns diverting patients to other hospitals that were less full, according to several nurses.

“I hate the holidays,” said a frazzled Sue Cruz, a nursing supervisor at St. John’s Regional Medical Center in Oxnard. “Every year this happens.”

While not as bad as in past years, this season has seen its share of both sick folks and accident victims.

“It’s a little bit of everything. The flu, trauma cases and a lot of other things. It runs the gamut,” said Don Lake, a nursing supervisor at Ventura County Medical Center in Ventura.

On Saturday, all hospitals in the county had reached capacity in intensive and critical care units, which meant that emergency room patients who needed to transfer to those units were forced to wait until a bed became free.

“The ICU, the CCU and the ER all work together, so when you’re on diversion it means you don’t have any more ICU and CCU beds for the ER to feed to or you don’t have any more patient beds in the ER,” said Kris Carraway-Bowman, a spokeswoman for Los Robles Regional Medical Center in Thousand Oaks.

Former Ventura resident Patricia Tarango, 26, waited patiently at Ventura County Medical Center’s emergency room Sunday with her 6-week-old daughter, Alicia.

Alicia has been congested and stuffy since Friday when the Tarango family got off a plane from Tennessee, where her husband is stationed with the Army.

Patricia and Henry Tarango, who are visiting their parents for the holidays, are the lucky ones. Everyone else in the family is battling flu symptoms of some kind, Patricia Tarango said.

Mother and child had to wait nearly two hours Sunday before being admitted at the bustling emergency room. But Tarango took it in stride.

“Right now, they’re really, really packed,” she said.

When emergency rooms get full, the most serious cases that come through the door are treated immediately, while others suffering from less serious problems must wait--sometimes for several hours.

The wait can be equally long for patients who need to transfer to a critical care unit, Carraway-Bowman said.

When all the hospitals in the county are full, each is required to accept patients and just do whatever needs to be done to make room, nurses said.

“If everyone is full, we each have to take care of our own,” said a nursing supervisor at a Ventura hospital.

Nurses say the overflow of patients is caused by several things, primarily upper-respiratory infections that produce flu-like symptoms. Conditions include pneumonia, sinus infection and bronchitis.

Some nurses said strong winds have created problems for people with asthma and other respiratory ailments.

Each hospital also reported a handful of influenza cases, as well as several patients earlier this month who were suffering from a stomach virus that was going around, Carraway-Bowman said.

Such problems are compounded when a sick person spreads a virus or other illness to an entire family. And with relatives visiting from out of town during the holidays, there is a larger pool of potential patients.

“We’ve had backups where we had to divert patients to other hospitals, and we’ve also had to accept patients from other hospitals,” Carraway-Bowman said.

If Los Robles, for example, is full, patients will often be diverted to Simi Valley Hospital or St. John’s Pleasant Valley Hospital in Camarillo.

Hospital staffs have not been immune from this season of illness. More than a dozen nurses at Los Robles have called in sick on and off since the start of the month.

And at all area hospitals, nurses are being asked to work overtime or shorten their vacations because of the rush of patients.

“At this time of year we don’t grant extended vacations. People are given choices of what holiday is most important to them,” said Cruz, the supervisor at St. John’s Regional Medical Center.

Despite overcrowding and long waits, hospital officials say the public can be assured that anyone who comes into an emergency room will be treated.

But if someone is picked up by ambulance and the nearest hospital is diverting emergency room patients, the patient could be rerouted.

“It’s a huge jump all of a sudden. Overnight we had no beds,” Cruz said.

Times Community News reporter Tony Lystra contributed to this story.