Would you leave your child on their own in hospital overnight?

[anchovies]

Long term conditions aside, would you take your child to the hospital assessment unit, them get admitted and then you go home?

DS was admitted with pneumonia (he's now home and recovering other than having to go back for IV antibiotics) and I was surprised by the number of parents who went home and left their poorly children in hospital. The wards were massively understaffed but mainly due to the fact that nursing staff were all feeding, changing, bathing babies etc. One mum left her 8 month old dd who had had a convulsion at 4pm (no-one knew she'd gone) and came back at 11 am the next day. The staff had to give her her tea (discussing whether she was on solids), bath her, find her some pjs and nappies, get her to sleep, feed her breakfast etc. Her mum turned up and was complaining that she had been left watching cbeebies!

Found the whole thing very traumatic but maybe I'm missing something?

I respect peoples feelings on this - I dont trust hospitals myself through personal experience. Yet I wonder why people wouldnt leave for example a 7 year old in for a routine operation overnight on their own.

After all we have to leave vunerable elder relatives who are in exactly the same position really - worse in fact imo .

Maybe I'm just too trusting/lax - I get that feeling a lot on some of these threads.

I don't think that people should feel that they have done anything heinous by leaving children in hospital, at all!

Unless they have done it purely for their own selfish reasons (like the parents in the next bed this summer who left to watch a match in a pub and left their 5 yo post-op, in pain and very upset, and then returned drunk), all caring parents willmake a sensible and valid judgment based on all the circumstances. The two mothers I know who had small babaies whose lives were in balance both spent time away from the hospital. It helped them through it, and the babies were none the wiser.

Some childrens wards have 5 or 6 beds. DP has felt very uncomfortable as an adult man being right next to a 13 yo girl patient. 13 yo girls could also be sharing a two-bed bay with a 13 yo boy, too. Very little privacy.

You see, I find electra's comment "No way! You never know what they will be given while you're away for a start..." very depressing.

I am not picking on you electra - I have no idea what you have experienced in the past - but I can't help wondering why parents so mistrust other people with their children. I left my son in the care of some lovely health professionals. I had reasonable expectations that he would not need either myself or dh in the night, and fully believed that if he did have a medical emergency, the staff in the hospital would be far more qualified to deal with it than either of us. In fact, the second time I left him, he was not even supposed to be an overnight patient, but he was not allowed home until he weed, and he refused to wee, so in the end I left him with the nurses as I felt sure they were better able to deal with the situation than I was. They were fine with my decision.

Do people (not necessarily you electra, I am interested in anyone's view on this) really worry that their child will be given something inappropriate/treated inappropriately?

Luckily I have never experienced or seen anything as scary as the treatment Riven's dd received. I have however seen overworked nursing staff unable to tend to upset children who would have really benefitted from a family member/friend to comfort them. That's the reason I would do anything in my power to be there with them at all times. I find hospital overwhelming so I can only imagine how my young children would feel when already in pain/poorly.

I don't DG because of my experiences when I was a child - like I said earlier I actually enjoyed my time in hospital which is weird to hear I know - but someone else has said they have happy memories too.

I wonder if it has something to do with the individual hospital and the parent's feeling about it. i wonder if people would be happier to leaving their children in a specialised children's hosp which they thought was great with lots of nurses etc than their local one for eg.

Just a thought.

I agree it is sad though if people in general think that it is simply dangerous to leave their children in hospital (unless they have good reason/experience ike some posters). To start off with the expectation that hospital will hurt children through negligance is a bit sad.

I don't know riven it was just a thought. For eg of my local hospitals there are some I have more faith in than others.

I just agree with DG that it's a bit sad if people are having a starting point of a total lack of faith in the hospitals without any reason.

I think that is definitely something that has changed a lot in the 30 years since I was regularly in hosp.

They can't actually be that much worse, surely

ds2 was in scbu which as the consultant kept pointing out is an intensive care unit dealing with extremely ill babies.... yet on more than one occasion it was me correcting the doctors or nurses regarding orders for his treatment (he almost got an extra dose of ab's at one point which would have gone unnoticed if i hadn't shouted), explaining what was wrong with ds2 and how he was being treated to yet another new doctor, i even had to fight to have him taken off the drip after 4 days as the consultant kept insisiting that he needed it as he wasn't feeding enough... my belief was that he wasn't feeding because of the massive quantities of iv fluids and sure enough the second he came off the drip he started feeding tonnes. more than one of the nurses plainly stated that if i hadn't been there ds2 wouldn't have gotton better as quickly.

if anything i think people have too much faith in doctors most of the time i certainly haven't met many i'd trust my children's lives to

Gosh, some of you have had horrific experiences. My children between them have been inpatients at 3 different hospitals (discounting those where they were born!) and on the whole, I have been satisfied with their care - certainly had no reason not to trust the staff. The one hospital that seemed less well staffed that the others though was probably the one Riven is talking about (I am only guessing here and I hope this doesn't sound stalkerish, but I know which city you live in Riven, and if you mean the children's hospital there, my ds3 had an operation there). We took ds3 home on the day of his op rather than stay a night on the ward, despite the fact (or maybe because of it? - it made us more experienced) that his brother had the same op in another children's hospital and stayed in 2 nights following it. But even with that hospital, my only criticism was that the ward was understaffed and the parents were left to do the nursing, and there was nowhere for parents to sleep, rather than because I thought the staff were not going to care for my son.

And I still want to believe, despite the horror stories here, that hospitals are safe places to leave my children.

Our PICU had no beds so I had to leave my DD2 whilst she was in there. Leaving a newborn child is an awful, awful experience. However, the Sick Children's Trust provided wonderful accomodation which was literally two minutes from the PICU and the ward had a hot line to my room, so I got through.

I have spent a lot of time in hospital and I have seen children left day after day without a family visit, which I found incredibly sad, but I don't know the circumstances of the parents. I have known parents to take advantage of free 24-hour childcare to party night and day. I found that inexcusable.

Unfortunately, some people are terrible parents whether their child is sick or not. One of the most awful mothers I have ever come across DID stay with her child in hospital - I really wish that she hadn't...

DS2 has had countless hospital admissions and several operations. I would not leave him overnight. I am lucky in that I can stay as have Dh, good friends, grandparents etc that are all on hand for help with other children. On one very long stay when he was five months old it got to the stage when DH would stay for a night as I was so tired.

I actually wouldn't leave him for the reasons that riven has stated. DS2 isn't physically disabled but he is unable to speak and wouldn't be able to get his needs understood easily. He is 5. I have also had to step in one more than one occasion regarding medication. Too many doses, not enough pain relief, lost medical charts, had you noticed his oxygen levels dropping and the loud alarm going off!

I have however seen mums at the very end of their tether over having no choice but to leave their child. I always feel so sorry for them, and would never judge them.

My friend is packing a case and she'll be in hospital with her son for five days and nights because he's having a relatively minor op'. (He's 8) She has two other children.

My ds was in for three days and nights when he was diagnosed with t1 diabetes. I waited 'til he fell asleep then left him overnight. (He was 5)

I think it really depends on the child and what other things the mum has to do. Also, funnily enough I wasn't relishing the prospect of sleeping in a chair and eating hospital food for all that time. It meant I could bring nice stuff in for him and be we rested myself and able to be there.

I'm expecting my (as yet unborn) baby to need to be in SCBU, and we live relatively close to the hospital, so I doubt they'll give us accommodation. I am dreading that they will not let me stay all the time. I'm sure they won't.

I was in hospital on my own age 3 a couple of times. I cried day and night the whole time I was in there, except for once in the middle of the night a nice nurse came and read a book with me about colours and shapes - I can still see the pages in my mind. I had no notion of how long I'd been in there or whether I was ever going to get out.

Was also admitted on holiday twice and my parents left me to carry on enjoying their holiday with DSis. I was old enough to have some perspective on this (9 and 11 I think) and didn't cry, but I was sad. I was also bullied nastily by the long term patients on the occasions we were all left alone and totally unsupervised on the ward.

I left DS2 in NICU but there was no other option as i was discharged after my c-section and there were no facilities to stay until the final 48 hours when i was allowed in the little flat for parents to get feeding established.

I think NICU is a little different though to a normal paeds ward.

It was very hard leaving him but i spent most of each day there and did have a 3 year old at home who was very very upset that i wasn't around and neither was his new baby brother.

Am currently pregnant with dc3 and am dreading/expecting another nicu stay with this baby and ds2 will only be 18 months.

I have never felt so torn between my children as i did for that NICU stay and am full of admiration for people who have to cope with long hospital stays.

I agree that NICU is very different from a standard paed ward, not only from a staffing point of view, but also because the nurses in NICU are utterly trained in every aspect of the care of a sick newborn.

An older not so sick baby (such as one that has possibly had a convulsion but is otherwise well), even in the baby room of a paed ward, is never going to get the level of care that it will be used to at home on a 1-1 or 1-2 with its parent(s). Also at 8 months, and in a deeply unfamiliar environment (assuming only one off or very occasional stays), but before the age where you can understand what is going on (say 3 or so), it might be quite traumatic.

When I first read this I was horrified, but then I remembered a friend who had a 2.2 year old when her twins were born. one twin was in hospital for several months. the hospital was 1 hour on the bus away, the unit did not like the toddler being there, and she had the other twin at home (or with her on the bus) and she doesnt drive. She couldnt even get in to the hospital every day. There was no parent house or anything for her to stay in. So while I am horrified at one level by the mum of the 8 month old, I do wonder what else was going on, and why she had to leave, maybe she had no-one else who could look after her other kids?

riven that's horrendous.

in all fairness to the scbu where ds2 was they never once asked me to leave, i could have stayed 24/7 if i wanted but unfortunately when i was discharged from the maternity ward that would have meant me sleeping sitting bolt upright in a chair in the feeding room as there were no parental accomodation facilities at all for me to use.

MrsGBoring,

I am so sorry that you might have to leave your little one. We live relatively close to the hospital (25 mins drive) but we did finally get a place with the SCT on the day I was discharged from hospital after my c-section. The matenrity ward did great work and kept me in for five days.

I hope that you are lucky and find that you hit a quiet period and get accomoadation on site. I was told "probably not" because they didn't want to raise my hopes.

I hope that things work out for you too in the end.

Florence

Thank you for that, Florence. We've actually had a very positive appointment today and it's now looking much less likely that any of this will be necessary - if the baby can breathe well at birth (which is what they expect, though we can't really tell till baby's born) we'll be able to go home as normal, which was beyond my wildest dreams when all this was first diagnosed.

That's wonderful news. I know that you will continue to worry until you know for sure and I hope that it all goes well.

I have 2 children and dd2 has pnemonia just before christmas and we were there for a week. I stayed with dd2 the whole time, slept in the chair by her bed, only left her with dh, and waited for him to go and shower ect. I would normally wait till she was asleep to go and make a tea ect.
She was wired up loads and her alarms kept going off, and the nurses were brillant, but i never wanted to add extra pressure on them.

There was one child I saw in the week without a mum or dad sleeping was about 10 years old and had been hit by a car. Other than that all had mums and dads there.

I never did, when they were young and ended up chatting to and amusing other children that were left.

I think DS stayed overnight himself, when older about 9yrs, can't think why but I remember something about him being happy to watch buses out of the window until we got back in the morning, but can't rememeber properly.