I'm of two minds about CHO. Maybe my standards are too high, but can standards ever be too high around kids' resources?
On one hand, it's a beautiful place, with great fun murals all over the walls and a big big dollhouse (behind plexiglass) that visitors can walk around and gawk at in the lobby. And it's great that there's a facility that specializes in children's medical issues. All of that is extremely important.
However, our son had his adenoids and tonsils out here and I was not pleased with the way the medical staff handled it. He was terrified, and they gave him some drugs to calm him down - which made him groggy and tipsy and "high" but no less terrified - and then their way of dealing with it beyond that was basically to let us come in to the prep room and help hold him down while they sedated him. It was ridiculous. He actually punched one of the doctors, in the process. The doctors kept trying to get him to count to 15 and telling him that he was "almost there," which just made him more upset - why would you tell a child who didn't want to be sedated or have an operation that they were almost sedated and ready to have the operation? He and I discussed it afterward, and we both agreed that it would have helped him enormously if they had, for example, told him to put the mask on and breathe for fifteen seconds (or however long) and that if he wasn't ready to have the operation at that point then they wouldn't do it. Or, you know, if they had talked to him/us in advance about ways to make this easier for him. Brute force just made it worse.
And further, I have heard (in ASL classes at Vista) that Children's is in trouble with the local Deaf community because they direct parents of Deaf children to the oralist school all the way across the Bay, even though there is a really good Deaf school in San Jose. Oralism is a really bad educational method for Deaf kids, because it essentially denies them language and instead spends literally years trying to make them lipread and speak like hearing kids. This delays their education and social skills and development tremendously - can you imagine not having a way to communicate with your family or really understand everything they're saying until you're nine? Or older? Literacy rates among kids raised with oralism are abysmal; a good Deaf school teaches sign (and a supportive family will learn sign language for their kids) as well as everything else kids need to learn - as well as providing an entry into Deaf culture and community and giving the kids role models. It's incredibly inappropriate to not even tell hearing parents that this is an option.
more