Reply to Sheppard Pratt Children's Inpatient Unit

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[quote=Anonymous]Last I heard late, in late 2018/early 2019, Adventist was re-opening.

OP, I am really glad you had a great experience at Shepherd Pratt, but consider yourself very lucky.   We know multiple bad stories re Shepherd Pratt - from 2018 and 2017.  One was our own and others were clients of a prominent practitioner whom many of you probably know.  Our child was assaulted more than once by the same, much larger child.  The assaults also happened within a day or two of each other - in front of a crew of staff who did not notice or did not act to prevent (particularly the second assault).  The assaults were to the head area, and one was to the temporal region and could have become a TBI. The staff was not very forthcoming about it all either.  Most of the staff were very nice but they did not seem to have the manpower or skills or resources etc. to help our child.

Also, there were some medication issues that I found perplexing at best.  One had to do with another medical condition my child has, and one had to do with a medication that they were trying but which had potential affects on other organs.  I will not go into the whole story but it did not inspire a lot of confidence.  I chalk it up to insufficient resources.

We came out of it no better off - just drugged to the point of not being able to function at school.  Since we did not live in MD, there was no transition program available.  Our child then spiraled down much further over the course of the next 6 months.  Our various drs and experts at home agreed that my son was in terrible shape when he came out but also that there was no good option in terms of another inpatient facility.

As an interesting after-effect, my child is now so scared of hospitals in general that he will not get near them.  He talks often about the treatment at Shepherd Pratt and the nightmares he has due to his stay there.  He hates us for requiring him to go there.  I could go on and on.

Re CN - again I could recount multiple bad stories, ours and others. Also, during our visit, our child was almost assaulted in front of 4-5 staff members who did not seem to be busy really (were chatting etc.).  They said "there was a blind spot" that prevented them from noticing that a ~150 lb older boy was preparing to assault my 50 lb child.   I happened to be there and rescued my staff and alerted staff, who put the larger child in a padded room for a while (ie they recognized that the older child was preparing to assault my son when I rescued my child).  Children's attending physicians and Social Worker later told us that they were not the right place because we were doing so much for our child already and that they were not very skilled with HFA Kids like ours.

Same story for Dominion - multiple bad stories and no good ones.  We have not gone there however, so I don't have any first hand accounts.

I have spoken to a lot of psychiatrists, psychologists, neuro-psychologists and social workers about the inpatient situation in the DMV.  None of them have thought that inpatient hospitalization was likely to help.  All of them have expressed that the system is broken - particularly the crisis system.[/quote]

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