Best Pediatrician for Premies

[Anonymous]

My son was born at 34 weeks and spent 3 weeks in the Georgetown Hospital NICU. They are suggesting Georgetown Pediatrics. Does anyone have good recommends for either specific pediatricians within Georgetown Pediatrics or other Pediatricians that’s they’ve seen with premie babies?

[Anonymous]

Is that practice convenient for you? Mine wasn’t a preemie but really in these early months, the main thing is convenience. You don’t want to be spending too much time stuck in traffic etc.

[Anonymous]

Agree with PP. The best pediatrician is one who is close to you, offers same-day sick appointments, and has an outlook on baby growth and development that makes you comfortable.

With a preemie, criteria 1 and 2 are even more important, because I would imagine you might have more sick days and checkups than a full-term baby might. Keep in mind that for a group practice, you might choose to see one particular doc for regular checkups, but sick appts are luck of the draw.

[Anonymous]

Are they having you do appointments at the nicu follow up clinic? Typically preemies are seen at both their regular ped and at the nicu follow up clinic (appointments with neonatologists) for the first year ish. Our 33 weeker went monthly until about 8 months when he was meeting all normal baby milestones. It’s at the Georgetown Peds in Friendship Heights. If that’s convenient for you then I would definitely use them as your regular pediatrician too, they were great.

[Anonymous]

I follow the recommendation of the neonatologists, especially if they are making that recommendation because they work closely with the practice and they have real experience with preemies. We had a difficult time with pediatricians with our 34 weeker who had some feeding issues and was slow to gain weight, especially as first time parents. To give you a sampler of the things we experienced from pediatricians who didn't know anything about preemies or had harebrained suggestions on how to deal with them.

-Pediatrician in CT raised alarm bells about daughters weight but gave zero solutions for her refusal to take bottles. It was our doula who suggested we look into reflux meds. After we had to beg to get them prescribed, they did help and her intake volumse went up. THis is a super common issue with preemies and the doctors didn't even bother to ask about it.
-Our pediatricians here in Virginia (we moved from CT when daughter was 6 months old) looked only at her actual age growth percentile. When we insisted they also look at her adjusted age, they told us that they 'didn't want to pay for the extra feature in the software' so they couldn't show that.
-We were offered an opportunity to go to the nurse practitioner who had done rounds in gastro at our VA pediatrician for our 12 month (actual) appointment. She insisted that we end bottles for our daughter and replace it with the same volumes (>20 oz/day) of Pediasure in sippy cups. We thought this was insane - it would be almost a 30% increase of calories coming from liquids at a time when our daughter needed to be increasing her solid intake in tandem - and when we rejected the advice and our daughter flat lined on weight for three weeks, I was a little afraid we were going to have CPS called on us by the reaction of the peds.

In the end our daughter is now 17 months and has gone from ~2% at 6 months to 17% now so she's done great even on an objective measure - it just was such a huge amount of stress to deal with doctors who didn't 'get it'. We now go to a concierge practice where the doctor knows the whole family and is much more willing to help.

I also would highly recommend as one of the other posters mentioned to do the NICU grad program if you are offered the option, We were enrolled at our local hospital in CT but couldn't find somewhere in the DC area that would take us. We found those appointmenets hugely reassuring and they meant so much more because they were from folks that actually knew what to expect from preemies, especially late term ones that are more likely to be treated like a 'normal baby' by the general pediatrician population.

Good luck! Wishing you all the best.