Dear Pediatric Patient,

With students back in school and our state seeing a surge in COVID cases, InterMed Pediatrics is experiencing an exceptionally high volume of patient calls. Rest assured that we are doing our best to answer every inquiry with the care and service you expect from InterMed.

We have added staff to help respond to the increase in calls, and ask for your patience and understanding. While we encourage you to leave a voicemail or a send a message through our patient portal, we ask that you do not do both. Our staff is working through messages as quickly as possible, and responding to a duplicate impacts their ability to answer another patient’s inquiry.

Sick vs. well visits
To protect our patients and staff during the pandemic, patients with any symptoms — from congestion to a fever — are seen at our Acute Care Clinic in South Portland. To ensure patients are treated in the appropriate location, please let us know if your child is ill, and if so, please do not bring them to your regular office location.

In addition, to minimize the risk of exposure to COVID and other illness, we are also trying to limit the number of visitors in our offices:

• Please do not bring siblings of a patient to an appointment
• Please have only one parent accompany a patient to an appointment.

Finally, as a reminder, please remember that all well or sick visits are by appointment only. Please do not come to our offices without an appointment.

Pediatric COVID vaccines
Many of you have asked about the availability of a COVID vaccine. Pfizer is expected to request FDA authorization for its COVID vaccine for children ages 5 – 11 in the coming weeks. If approved, we will contact parents to offer a vaccine for eligible children.

These are challenging and stressful times. Despite the current surge, I’m optimistic that we’ll find our way out of this pandemic through vaccination, masking, and practicing good hand hygiene.

Thank you for your support and understanding. Please stay safe and well.

Mary Jennings, MD, Chief of Pediatrics, and the entire Pediatrics care team