Why is Sibley bad?
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Anonymous
| I can't afford the fee so I'm not going there. Refuse to share a room and I want my Dh to spend the night |
Anonymous
| NP here - I read the new hospital will also have 2 shared rooms so that they can charge again. I don't know if that's true, but if it is, that's outrageous. |
Anonymous
| I had a private room at Georgetown. Had to stay there a month before I delivered. It was amazing. SO glad the NICU was down the hall. Didn't have to pay anything extra. |
Anonymous
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They have little to no trauma care there. For instance, they don't get any major car accidents or shooting. If something goes very wrong, my experience is that they did not have the basic equipment or doctors on hand to handle it. I needed a transfusion and it took them waaaaaay to long to even get that basic stuff up and running. They needed to call in a trauma specialist and it took him hours to get there. I don't think that would happen at GW, which has a trauma center.
That was a few years ago, so maybe it's gotten better. |
Anonymous
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What's the big deal? People will happily pay $5000 to go to Disney but balk at the minimal cost for a private room at Sibley? I delivered two there and it was as pleasant as labor and delivery can be. Great nurses, great care
What more can you legitimately ask for?! |
Anonymous
Functional blood transfusors in the OB operating rooms. That's what I'd ask for. |
Anonymous
No honey, I wouldn't pay $5000 to go to Disney either. I think you're confused about rich people such as yourself, and middle class people like me. Priorities. |
Anonymous
I hate logic like this. So just because you'd spend $5000 on an often once in a lifetime trip (I'd rather go to the islands) you would fork over $400 for a room ($1600 in my case)? Does that mean I shouldn't blink at spending $200 on jeans or $300 on a diaper bag, what about $1,000 on a stroller? When does it stop? Anyway, we are delivering at Sibley because of the excellent care but opting for shared room. I gotta make sacrifices. |
Anonymous
Wow. That is awful. I know two friends who needed transfusions during their deliveries. One vaginal and one C section. One friend lost over half her blood volume from a hemorrhage and need emergency transfusion and hysterectomy. I would never deliver there knowing this. Even my amazing GP - who is affiliated with Sibley and in their office building - said she would not recommend delivering at Sibley (at least until the new building is done) because they aren't equipped to deal with complications. I dont understand why so many love the place when there are so many great hospitals in this area. |
Anonymous
+1 Same rationale re: NICU. My SIL is a NICU nurse and has worked in multiple NICUs including the highest risk ones. The thing about the low-risk NICUs is often they are staffed by people who do not regularly encounter issues. She has said she would never deliver at less than a level 3 for that reason. You probably won't need it, but you just don't know. |
Anonymous
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A blood transfusion is actually a really routine and standard procedure that is unlikely to go wrong due to "operator error."
I'd like to hear a few more specifics from the poster claiming that the hospital lacked functional (what does that even mean?) transfusion capability in the OR. Before I blame a hospital -- an RN who has never worked at Sibley |
Anonymous
It's my OB that I love. I hate that they exclusively deliver at Sibley. I'd love for them to apply some pressure - especially with the delay in opening the new hospital. But the practice, to my knowledge, doesn't. They supply Sibley with a lot of patients but don't seem to leverage their position. I don't mind the idea of Sibley, I mind the idea of ONLY delivering at Sibley. |
Anonymous
| Paying for private room and the fact that they don't really have a NICU. IMO, the reason to give birth at a hospital instead of a birthing center is so you and the baby can have great care immediately if something serious goes wrong. But at Sibley if something serious goes wrong, they will send your baby to G'town and you will be stuck at Sibley. Also, if you go into labor early, you will be sen to G'town and your medical records may not transfer (this happened to my friend, she showed up at G;town after that is where her doctor told her to go and G'town had no idea she was coming and no info about her case). |
Anonymous
It was me--I'll try it get the medical terminology right, but forgive me if I don't. I had a arterial hematoma that burst through the vaginal wall leading to massive Hemorhage. The OB tried to sew it up in the delivery room but was utterly unsuccessful. My BP was too low to move me, so they gave me epi-something to get my heart beating more strongly then moved me to an OR. There was no blood warmer in the OR so they could not transfuse me. The anesthesiologist called a nurse to find one but it was taking too long, so he said he was going to go search ORs to try to find one and took off running. He did find one and I got 5 liters. The other problem was that they needed to call in a specialist (something like vascular intervention???) and it took hours for the guy to show up. The poor anesthesiologist kept calling and calling to ask where he was an when he would be there, and they just kept telling him within the hour. They did put foam into my arteries to stop the bleeding--luckily I was clotting okay, or I would not have made it until the guy showed up. Also, when the anesthesiologist first called for the specialist, they connected him to the wrong department and he had a farcical 5 minute conversation trying to figure out why they didn't understand what he was asking for, before he figured out it wasn't the right department even. It seemed pretty comical, largely because I was on massive amounts of pain killers that they had given me after the birth, when I kept complaining that the pain was getting worse. They just seemed like a hospital that wasn't particularly prepared to deal with a lot of blood loss. I'm still here typing this, so it obviously wasn't catastrophic. I'm sure it's fine for most deliveries. |
Anonymous
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Oh, I forgot--they also did not have the right kind of gauze in the OR for packing the wound. I think they ended up tying together the little ones because there weren't strips? That seems crazy but that's what I remember.
I'm mainly going off how pissed off the two doctors seemed about all these things. I would have no idea what a properly stocked OR should have, but the doctors seemed pretty mad that this stuff wasn't there. I should also say--this was all several years ago. Hopefully they've got it sorted out now. But they still are not the kind of hospital that gets major trauma, so I'd guess they just don't have the people in the building that can deal with it (like how they had to call in that specialist who took like 4 or 5 hours to get there--my guess is that someplace like GW would have someone like that actually in the building). |