Hospital warning: If you are looking for Pokemon please don’t come to A&E
Doctors face ‘unwanted distraction’ and police get 999 calls from gamers as craze sweeps the country
DOCTORS and nurses at an Accident and Emergency department might be considered busy enough treating patients without also having to cope with an invasion of cartoon animals.
That, however, is precisely the situation at a Midlands hospital after it became a focal point for players of the new craze game Pokémon Go.
Managers at Royal Stoke University Hospital were horrified to discover the A&E department had become a “gym” for Pokémon, causing players to enter the unit in order to “train” the augmented reality characters.
Pokémon Go, in which players use smartphones to search for digital characters in real-life locations, launched in the UK last week.
The game has prompted several safety warnings, such as when a group of teenagers in Wiltshire were left stranded 100ft underground in caves after getting carried away while searching for characters.
Staff at Royal Stoke originally agreed that patients could play Pokémon Go on the wards to encourage them to exercise.
However a warning has now been posted on its website, stating people may not enter A&E simply to hunt Pokémon.
Kevin Parker, associate chief nurse at Royal Stoke, said the A&E department was currently “incredibly busy”.
“Members of the public who do not need to be at Royal Stoke should not attempt to enter A&E or any oth- er part of the hospital building to play the game,” he said.
“We want the public to understand that anybody who visits the hospital solely to play the game will provide an unwanted distraction to the important work of the hospital.”
If Pokémon Go gamers became a major nuisance, staff at the hospital said they would be forced to contact the game’s developer, Nintendo, and have the virtual gym removed. Pokémon gyms often occur in locations used by a large number of people, with other popular venues including pubs and football grounds.
The wildly popular new game set off a security alert at Leicestershire Police headquarters on Friday when Pokémon Go players gathered at the site looking for characters.
Gloucestershire Police received a 999 call from a player telling them someone had “stolen their Pokémon”.
Nottinghamshire Police have pleaded with users to be considerate after two teenage boys inadvertently alarmed residents as they hunted for Pokémon by torchlight at night.
At an amusement park in Kettering, Pokémon users were so engrossed in their smartphones that some have walked into trees and others have fallen into a lake.
The game’s popularity has caused Nintendo’s share price to rise by 90 per cent in the last fortnight.
‘People who do not need to be at Royal Stoke should not attempt to enter A&E’