Our physicians have
privileges to attend your newborn infants at Glendale Adventist Medical
Center and Verdugo Hills Hospital in Glendale, Huntington Memorial
Hospital in Pasadena, and Providence St. Joseph Medical Center in
Burbank. In addition, if your child needs to be admitted to a
hospital, our doctors attend at both Huntington Memorial Hospital in
Pasadena and Childrens Hospital Los Angeles in Hollywood.
Same day sick visits,
follow-up appointments, and physical exams can be scheduled with our
friendly front office staff. When calling to schedule these
appointments, please inform our staff of the complexity of your visit so
that appropriate time can be scheduled.
Our physical exams are often scheduled weeks in advance. If you
need a physical exam for your child earlier than we can routinely
schedule, you may choose to be placed on our waiting list. If a
patient cancels an appointment we can offer those on the waiting list an
earlier appointment.
We start every day with
numerous open appointments for urgent visits. If your child
requires urgent attention we will do whatever is necessary to see him or
her. Please call ahead.
During business hours, we
have licensed nurses to help you with your questions and
concerns. All have many years experience both as nurses and mothers
themselves.
If you call after hours you
will be given a list of options. We will check messages left on
the machine the next business day. If you have an emergency you
will be able to call the answering service to speak with the on-call
physician. If you need the doctor paged immediately please inform
the answering service and they will page the doctor on call. For
other non-emergent inquiries, please allow an hour for the physician to
call you back.
We will always try to give
you an appointment with the doctor of your choice, but this is sometimes
not possible. When your child’s doctor is out of the office, or
has no availability that fits with your schedule, we will offer you an
appointment with one of the other doctors, so that your child can be
seen on a timely basis.
We do not double book
appointments. This practice only increases waiting time and is not
fair to our patients. We occasionally have patients come in
immediately, such as in an asthma attack, but we book out time to catch
up. We have pre-scheduled catch-up time that we do not ever book
in order to minimize waits; however, sometimes if visits become
unexpectedly complex this will put us behind.
We ask that you give us 24
hours notice for cancellations so that we can fill the appointment,
since we do not double book. We reserve the option to charge for
no-shows and late cancellations.
If you arrive late, your
appointment time has passed. Since late patients are the most
common reason that we get behind, you might need to be rescheduled if it
is not an urgent appointment, or wait until we have time if it is a
relatively urgent problem.
Please fax us at
818-502-9247. If it is very important, please call the office as
well to make sure we received the fax. We cannot guarantee that we
will be able to address your fax the same day we receive it.
We accept many different
insurance plans. We primarily take PPO and EPO insurance
plans. To confirm that we accept your specific plan please call our
office and speak with our staff to get our group ID number.
We believe immunizing your
child is the most important step you can take to avoid the preventable
infectious diseases of childhood. We endorse the current schedule
of vaccines recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics, the
American Committee on Immunization Practices, and the United States
Centers for Disease Control. This schedule and answers to many
commonly asked vaccine questions can be viewed at the following
websites.
We advise our parents to
introduce solid foods at six months of age. Children introduced to
foods prior to six months have a slightly increased risk of developing
allergies to those introduced foods. Also, despite a common
misperception, solid foods will not help your child sleep through the
night.
The AAP recommends that an
infant be given only breastmilk or formula for the first six months of
life. Once solids are introduced after six months of life, water
can be introduced.
Circumcision is rarely a
medically mandatory procedure. There are pros and cons, and there
is no clear evidence of benefit. We do perform newborn
circumcisions at the request of the parents in our office as well as the
hospital.
Most childhood infections
are caused by viruses. Viral infections do not resolve or improve with
antibiotics. Also, some bacterial infections will resolve equally
quickly without antibiotics. Certain infections require antibiotics to
get better, and for those it is extremely important to complete the
prescribed course. We recommend that medications be used as little as
necessary.