Calif. Hospitals Gearing up to Care for Surge of Super Bowl Fans

Feb. 01--Bucking Broncos and snarling Panthers aren't the only beasts roaming the region this Super Bowl week.

The Unpredictable Party Animal also is on the loose. But while many aren't going to the game, they might be stampeding area hospitals.

As tens of thousands of Super Bowl 50 fans descend on the Bay Area this week, anyone needing urgent medical attention should brace themselves for even more crowded emergency rooms.

Medical staff in previous Super Bowl cities have warned their local counterparts to expect at least 20 percent more ER traffic, which means longer, testier wait times for patients -- and a plea for the public to reconsider their options.

"I would encourage folks to utilize urgent care and express care systems, and their primary health care providers, for non-life threatening situations and use the emergency rooms for true emergencies," said Brandon Bond, administrative director of emergency management for the Stanford Health Care System.

With such a flood of national visitors, those emergency room staffs also are setting up Incident Command Centers all week inside their hospitals. At the centers, medical and safety personnel will coordinate their response to any mass casualties in the unlikely event of any disaster, including a terrorist attack.

At Good Samaritan Hospital in San Jose, Chief Operating Officer Jordan Herget said the hospital's center will have a "soft" opening Monday and be fully staffed by Sunday.

"We have two areas of work we have divided," said Dr. Hernando Garzon, director of emergency management for Kaiser Permanente, the "official" medical team for Super Bowl 50.

One, he said, is Kaiser's external presence at events, from "Super Bowl City" and the "NFL Experience" in San Francisco to Saturday's "Super Community Celebration" happening at Santa Clara University.

The other is coordinating staffing and preparedness plans for the expected surge of patients at Kaiser's eight hospital emergency rooms between San Francisco and San Jose.

Both, he said, "are integrated in terms of not just that (game) day, but what could make news every day."

Variety of problems

"News" is relative, of course, but as game day approaches, Garzon and other emergency room doctors anticipate the kinds of issues they normally confront -- only more of them: victims of alcohol and drug overdoses, some leading to serious falls; food poisoning, heart attacks, strokes and car accidents.

At the game, toss in injuries from possible fist fights, slips and falls, and items thrown like missiles onto crowds of electrified fans.

The annual football fest event also arrives in the middle of the cold and flu season, typically a high-stress time of year for U.S. hospitals. Luckily, say health care experts, the current flu season has been somewhat mild, likely because of a more effective vaccine.

"I think we can expect to see a mixture of patients who come as walk-ins," said Trudy Johnson, chief nursing officer at Santa Clara Valley Medical Center, which is a designated "level one" trauma center in the county, along with Stanford Health Care.

"Some (travelers to the Bay Area) may have forgotten their prescriptions, and they need their medications," Johnson said. "Some may come in from a food-borne illness, maybe others from motor vehicle accidents. And there's going to be a mixture of people who have overindulged in eating and drinking too much at parties. It's hard to tell."

Like others, Johnson said VMC is well-prepared for the surge of patients. It's part of a countywide coalition of at least 10 hospitals that have been Super Bowl training for over a year to coordinate emergency medical services for everything from the mundane to the most extreme.

Disaster planning

Proving that no amount of preparation is too much, Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for the Super Bowl 50 Host Committee, said teams of medical and emergency personnel, among others, from Santa Clara and San Francisco were sent to the last few Super Bowl games to better understand how to move huge crowds across the region -- and protect tens of thousands of fans from violence and pregame festivities.

Then, last April, dozens of doctors, nurses, hospital, safety and other staff from area hospitals attended a weeklong crash course in Alabama on mass casualty events at FEMA's Center for Domestic Preparedness.

Dr. Laura Cook, medical director of the emergency department at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, was among those who attended. Along with 25 others in her group, she was immersed in multiple, but simultaneous extreme drills -- a bombing, a shooting, a helicopter crash and biological warfare -- designed to overwhelm her resources and test her decision-making skills under pressure.

"It's not something you would get in medical school," Cook said. "When we brought it back to our hospital, we all sort of looked at the processes we had with a more critical eye and targeted specific things to change and improve."

Still, Cook, Kaiser's Garzon, and Good Samaritan's Herget, among others, are concerned about traffic, and particularly on Super Bowl Sunday, when road closures and plans for certain highway configurations could impact emergency medical service. Hospitals' staffs not already assigned to work this weekend are studying alternate routes to work in case of a catastrophe.

Dr. David Ghilarducci, director of emergency medicine at O'Connor Hospital, has worked in the midst of mass casualties, including the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti. He believes the region's hospitals have done their best to prepare for the worst.

"Any disaster in a particular area will overwhelm the locally available resources -- demand will always outstrip supply," Ghilarducci said.

"But disaster planning is about having the ability to respond quickly, mobilize forces, and target them appropriately. I think we have a robust set of resources available to us to do that."

Contact Tracy Seipel at 408-920-5343. Follow her at Twitter.com/taseipel.

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