Address: 251 E. Huron Street, Chicago, Illinois 60611
Number of live births: 12011
Survey submitted: 07/16/2019
Teaching hospital status: Teaching
Area: Urban
Number of high risk deliveries:
166
Quality of high risk deliveries:
Fully Meets Standard
Maternity care process:
Fully Meets Standard
Screening newborns for jaundice before discharge:
Better than Target
Preventing blood clots in women undergoing cesarean section:
Better than Target
I wanted to be in a hospital for my first child’s birth. I worked with the Northwestern Women’s Group Midwives and a doula, and found that the care was terrific. I had to be induced and did have an episiotomy, but the team was very accommodating of my birth preferences and I felt part of those decisions at each step. Post-birth, I felt well cared for. Pro-tip if you’re feeling OK / want to skip the pain meds in favor of sleep: Ask your nurse if they can come at the same interval for checking on you and your babe, so you’re not being interrupted every 20 mins in the middle of the night 🙂
N/A
I would give negative stars if I could. I was in labor for nearly 20 hours at Prentice. After pushing for just 45 minutes, the OB asked me if I wanted to do a forceps delivery. I declined. One hour later, she asked again. I declined again. At 2.5 hours, she asked again, at which point I was too delirious and exhausted to provide informed consent. She called in a resident, who I had never seen before, to perform the forceps delivery on me. He did not perform an episiotomy (which actually may have helped avoid the injury I sustained). He inserted the forceps and pulled out my child with one loud pop. Fortunately, my child was healthy, but the forceps had given me a near fourth degree laceration, a dangerous birth injury that was never explained to me by the OB. The OB let the resident perform the repair of my injury, which was, unsurprisingly, inadequate. The postpartum nurses at Prentice were unknowledgeable and unkind. They did not show me how to clean or take care of my laceration. I was not examined by an OB upon discharge from Prentice two days later. I had acquired a severe wound infection and took myself back to the ER a few days later after several calls to the on-call OBs, who didn’t seem particularly concerned about my situation. I was admitted back to Prentice and referred to the urogynecology/colorectal surgery doctors, who were the first to explain the severity of my injury to me in detail, advise on wound care, and inform me that I would need a repair surgery after the infection had cleared. I had the repair surgery under general anesthesia several weeks after I was discharged from the hospital, which, although ultimately about 95% successful, lead to an unbelievably long and excruciatingly painful healing process during which I could not care for my child. Now: here is perhaps the most important thing to take away from my story. After this happened to me, I spoke with numerous other women who endured the EXACT same experience at Prentice. They too were pressured into forceps deliveries, endured severe tears (and also, in some cases, broken tailbones), developed infections, and required additional surgeries. Prentice is trying by any means possible to keep its C-section rate low, and is therefore resorting to assisted deliveries with forceps in cases where C-sections would be safer for mothers – essentially just to make their numbers look good. (I suspect that they’re not doing many episiotomies for the same reason.) Also, they put a cap of three hours on the time that a woman is allowed to push, so even if everything is fine with mother and baby, they demand intervention by the three hour mark. Prentice is NOT the hospital to deliver at if you want to be treated like a human being, and not like a data point. They do not care about the lives of mothers.
N/A
Got a minute? Contribute to our community.
Sign up for access to exclusive promotions, latest news and opportunites to test new pre-release products
