Valley Hospitals Packed Due to Rash of Illnesses

This is a particularly bad time to get seriously ill in the San Fernando Valley. Many local hospitals reported Tuesday they are filled to capacity with those suffering from flu and a variety of other winter illnesses.

“We have been absolutely inundated,” said Joan Cole, nursing supervisor at North Hollywood Medical Center. “I can’t remember when it has been this bad, and I’ve been here 20 years.”

Officials at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center in Mission Hills said their emergency room patients who need to be admitted have to wait eight or nine hours for a bed.

“We leave them in a place where a nurse can look after them,” said hospital supervisor Richie Steinborn. “Still, it’s a long time to wait.”

But medical officials said there was no single type of flu or other condition causing the hospital overload.

“There are a lot of respiratory problems, a lot of pneumonia,” said Cole. “It doesn’t seem to be just one thing.”

Sam Fink, a physician associated with Tarzana Regional Medical Center, said that no exotic disease can be blamed. It’s just the flu and other associated conditions that commonly hit in the winter.

“What’s happened is that a lot of people are getting viral infections,” said Fink. “Most people can stay home and get better when they get them.”

But older people who get these infections can become more seriously ill. “They can easily get pneumonia,” Fink said, “and then they end up in the hospital.”

Fink said that at the Tarzana hospital, at least, many of the people being admitted are of an advanced age.

He minimized the current hospital overload. “I don’t think it’s all that unusual for this time of year,” he said. “We usually have a few weeks like this.”

But in other hospitals, officials said the situation seemed to them to be unusually widespread.

“We got a call from a hospital in the Antelope Valley asking if we could take their overflow for the weekend,” said Steinborn at Holy Cross. “We had to tell them we just couldn’t do it.”