A busy pediatrician’s office

If you want to know what it’s been like to work in a local pediatrician’s office the last couple months, read Dr. Roxanne Allegretti’s column, here, that appeared in our Health Living section yesterday. She did a great job of describing what she says was “vaccine chaos going on in the midst of a pandemic of sick patients.”

Allegretti, above, is a longtime pediatrician with Preferred Pediatrics at its North Stafford office. She said the office eventually had to stop taking calls from parents with H1N1 questions because it was completely overwhelmed, between the requests for appointments for sick kids and questions about the illness and the vaccine.

“I think we all felt like we should have a recorded message we could play in exam rooms: “Yes, we recommend the H1N1 vaccine. Yes, it’s safe. No, we don’t have it. No, we don’t know when we’ll have it or how much we’ll have," she wrote.

Allegretti also said she that the rush has slowed in the last three weeks. “We’re all breathing a sigh of relief and being cautiously optimistic that the worst has passed,” she wrote.

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