Officials of Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children have been telling players to stop dropping lures on hospital grounds as it raises safety concerns.
Pokemon Go has been a huge worldwide success, with the augmented reality game launching in Canada last Sunday. In a statement, the hospital officials said:
“Unfortunately Pokemon Go can create many challenging issues and safety concerns for our patients and may impeded staff in their work. Our patients are some of the sickest in Ontario and may be going through a very difficult time in their lives. We ask that individuals respect their privacy and the hospital space.”
Officials are also worried some children could get upset as they may not be able to leave certain areas of the hospital to catch the digital creatures.
Please don’t drop #PokemonGo lures inside or outside @SickKidsNews. Read our message: pic.twitter.com/lNqCFBQBjB
— SickKids_TheHospital (@SickKidsNews) July 18, 2016
The augmented reality game, which overlays images of Pokemon characters over real life objects, has become a worldwide sensation in less than a week.
Pokemon Go is now available in the Canadian App Store as a free download. The game requires any device running iOS 8.0 or later and contains in-app purchases that range between $1.39 and $139.99.
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Makes sense, hospital staff usually can only try to warn off(… and get ignored) having even a few cell phones near hospital equipment. A large swarm because of Poke Go players even outside, would be pretty tense or outright scary for these workers; that don’t need the stress from that.
Even then, probably good intentions sure. The poor kids will still be stuck in those rooms either way, just now stuck having to groups of people having fun outside… When really a game wouldn’t be no where as comforting or fun as their parents and other family members right now.
Really do hope people see this tweet, and listen to it.
Makes sense, hospital staff usually can only try to warn off(… and
get ignored) having even a few cell phones near hospital equipment. A
large swarm because of Poke Go players even outside, would be pretty
tense or outright scary for these workers; that don’t need the stress
from that.
Even then, probably good intentions sure. The poor kids
will still be stuck in those rooms either way, just now stuck having to
groups of people having fun outside… When really a game wouldn’t be
no where near as comforting or fun as their parents and other family members
right now.
Really do hope people see this tweet, and listen to it.
Would dropping more lures at the hospital not be beneficial for the children there? I don’t know if it was an official Pokemon/Niantic account, but there was some conversation on Twitter about encouraging players to drop lures at hospitals for patients that would be unable to go elsewhere.
well it seems that SickKids think it is not a good idea.
Yeah, the headline, article, and re-posted tweet all seem to say that.
This game needs to stop.