New York, NY –
With many emergency rooms filled with people concerned about swine flu, City Comptroller Bill Thompson is calling for greater coordination between hospitals and neighborhood health clinics.
THOMPSON: Let's notify patients about some of the ambulatory care facilities that surround these hospitals. Then Let's make sure there are personnel coverage there.
REPORTER: A spokesman for the Jamaica Medical Center says that fears about swine flu more than doubled patient traffic into the emergency last week. He says those numbers seem to be declining.
The hospital spokesman didn't have figures on how many people are truly sick and how many are what doctors call "the worried well."
Thompson gave a speech in Jamaica and said that two recent hospital closures in Queens, St. John's and Mary Immaculate, were straining hospitals even before the latest concerns about swine flu.
Fred Mogul has been covering healthcare and medicine for WNYC since 2002. His beat takes him to hospitals, community clinics, doctors offices, health agencies, public schools and research labs across the metropolitan area. His work has appeared on NPR and in the New York Times, Time magazine and Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
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