This past Saturday, January 9, Andrea and I toured what will be our baby’s hospital birthplace: Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center. A gorgeous and modern-looking hospital with friendly and efficient doctors and nurses.
So Why Kaiser? The reason we chose Kaiser is simple, as an employee of the City and County of San Francisco, I selected Kaiser Permanente as my health provider. I’ve always had Kaiser so it just made sense to select them when I started working for San Francisco. We specifically chose Kaiser Permanente San Francisco Medical Center because there are only two main hospitals that has a Labor & Delivery Department: San Francisco or Redwood City.
It’s important to note that if you are under 36-weeks, they strongly recommend for you to go directly to San Francisco as they are better equipped to deal with pre-term birth and labor. We had plans to tour both, but promptly cancelled our tour for Redwood City Kaiser after an Emergency Room visit to their Labor & Delivery Department because Andrea was having strong pains on one side of her stomach. The on-call OB/GYN that treated Andrea was rude, needlessly cruel, and unprofessional. Andrea has had an unusually difficult pregnancy and one would expect an OB/GYN doctor would be more sympathetic, but she was dismissive and not reassuring and made us feel like something is wrong with us. Redwood City Kaiser’s Labor & Delivery Department felt old and run-down, and we ultimately didn’t get a good feel for it and with the doctor’s treatment of us, that put us over the top.
So how does San Francisco Kaiser compare to Redwood City Kaiser? It’s like day-and-night difference. San Francisco Kaiser is huge and is separated into multiple high-rise buildings across from each other on Geary. The Labor & Delivery Department is in the same campus as the Emergency Room (which is convenient, I guess) which is actually the main campus at 2425 Geary Blvd. There is a Kaiser 24-hour parking garage nearby at O’Farrell and Broderick Street, which they recommend that you park in rather than trying to find street parking as cars have been broken into and DPT does ticket there religiously. The parking garage is small and you do have to pay to park in there. The 2-hour San Francisco Labor & Delivery Hospital Group Tour begins on the Mezzanine Level in one of their meeting rooms. The tour is led by an actual Labor & Delivery Department RN, which in our case was Nurse Ann Borja, a very friendly and fun RN who answered everyone’s questions and made the tour fun and exciting. Once we got a chance to meet her and go over some basic information such as emergency contact numbers, where to park, when you need to use the Emergency Department entrance, and etc., we all took the elevator to the 3rd Floor where the Labor & Delivery Department is. Compared to Redwood City Kaiser, San Francisco Kaiser is much more secure with a constant security guard watching the secured entrance to the Labor & Delivery Department. At Redwood City, it was a door where you pressed a button and they would buzz you in.
RN Ann Borja took us all around the Labor & Delivery Department showing us as much as she could. Unfortunately the day of our tour happened to be one of the rarest days in which ALL the birthing rooms unavailable and due to privacy issues, they can’t show us any rooms occupied by a patient. When in the event a situation like this arises, they may end up transporting mom and baby to another Kaiser facility with a Labor & Delivery Department. One of the best features of San Francisco Kaiser is that all eight of their birthing rooms are private, so one family per room, complete with a private shower, TV, and DVD player. And barring any major birth complications, from the moment the baby is born, he or she stays with you the entire time in the room! They do all the weighing, preping, monitoring, and etc. all right in front of you. Discharging takes place at 11 A.M. There is also a decent cafe on the first floor that has fresh made hamburgers and sandwiches but unfortunately it closes by 7 PM Monday-to-Friday. Fortunately there are a number of other restaurants that deliver nearby.
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