Atrium Health Levine Children's Hospital Emergency Department — Local services in Charlotte

My husband and I brought our 3-week old newborn to this ER location. It was by far the worst ER experience we had. Since we are first time parents, so many things are new for us. Our newborn was spitting up more than usual and had a couple instances of vomiting. We called our pediatric office and they recommended we go to the ER to rule out having pyloric stenosis. Below I have listed the issues we ran into from the minute we walked in the door.

1.) They recently enforced a rule that only 1 parent can go in. The other parent can come AFTER you’ve been assigned a room. This was absolutely frustrating as I have a newborn and had to go through check in, and be triaged while having her carrier. I was in the waiting room for about an hour. My husband didn’t want to wait any longer and decided to come in. He noticed there was another couple with an infant that the security guard let through.

2.) My daughter’s heart rate was checked in the waiting room (which was a hallway by the way!) There are sick children, she is out in the open, and she is immunodeficient as she is a newborn. Their section for immunodeficient patients was across the room but not a separate room. So my daughter still was exposed to germs!

3.) My daughter was triaged in a small room. It looked like it could’ve been a break room or closet! I noticed after she was seen, the nurse took other patients back. It did not look like it was sanitized or clean before or after patients went back there. They checked my daughter’s vitals in this room!

4.) When we were taken to a room, two nurses came to introduce themselves and explained we’d be in their care. We never saw them again the rest of the evening! We spoke with the doctor and eventually the supervisor doctor. This was all in the span of 2-3 HOURS.

5.) The doctors wanted to do an ultrasound to rule out her having this condition. Once we finally got to the ultrasound tech, he could BARELY speak English! We also could tell he had NEVER worked with a newborn! We were asking him questions on what he saw on the screen and he was very short with us. It was obvious that he was a little nervous. If anything, why don’t you have someone SUPERVISING him to make sure he is doing it correctly and communicating with us correctly!?

6.) They put us in a different room midway through our time there. This room was in the back and could easily be forgotten about. After the ultrasound, we waited for another hour before my husband checked to see if we could speak with someone. The doctor came in and let us know the results were fine and we could head home.

7.) Our total time here was 5 HOURS! I understand emergency rooms can be tough. Our biggest complaint is we have a newborn and this is a children’s hospital. We felt like her treatment was not one of care and understanding or how to handle a baby! We could’ve went to a regular emergency room to have this same experience. If anything, please create a separate unit that knows how to tend to babies properly!

DO NOT BRING...

The check-in people were amazing. Almost all of the hospital stuff were great from giving us shuttles to giving us directions. They were amazing. Whenever we checked in and the emergency room, those two back there in the triage person was amazing. I would give them five stars. We were in so fast. However, once we got to the room we waited over an hour and a half for someone to come and see us and then they're going to tell me that my kids problem is daycare even though my child's been having this problem for 8 to 12 months and it's only been in daycare about 8 days. I think the doctor's name was Raffler.. that lady did not give two s** about what I had to say about what was happening to my son about how we could help my son. I brought him to this hospital to get someone who actually cared and it seemed like all she cared about was getting patients in is out as fast as possible with not getting down to the bottom of what was causing my child to have favors for 6 months out of 8 months for 6 weeks out of 8 weeks. My son constantly has fevers for no freaking reason and you can't give me an answer because you're just going to automatically tell me it's daycare and he's only been enrolled in a head start program that started 8 days ago. I think this is the most horrible place to take people when it comes to actually being saying in the emergency room because they don't care they want people in and out to where they don't have to deal with you. But when everybody else is there doing their jobs they're wonderful. So I think Dr. Raffler needs some talking to because I would fire her. In my honest opinion I would not take my kids...

My daughter was lethargic and just not feeling herself for a couple of days so I decided to take her to the emergency room. It’s seemed their number one concern was if she had been fully vaccinated up until that point. Which she had (sometimes I wish I never did but the pediatricians push vaccines so hard to the point that you can feel them swaying their notes in a tone that you’re an unfit parent if you refuse them.. that’s another story) They decided to deem it appropriate to put an IV in her arm and draw blood. I’m okay with drawing blood but the IV felt unnecessary if they don’t know what’s going on yet. So they send in obviously inexperienced nurses to put the IV in my 14 month old baby’s arm. They have 3 women hold my baby down with their body weight on her as she’s screaming. The nurse gets it the first try by the vein collapses due to her body being so tense l. They continue to try again and 3 minutes go by and the nurse is literally turning the needles in different directions inside my baby’s arm while she is held down screaming still. I was so stressed out, I cried and told them to stop and that I wanted to speak to the doctor. They stopped and gave me a weird look as if they were just doing their job. The disconnect was surreal. But they left and the doctor came back. They then completely changed coarse of action forgoing the IV. After blood came back, all her numbers were fine. They said it was a viral infection that should clear up on its own. It was traumatic to say the least. My daughter had bruises on her little arms. I definitely would reconsider this location. In general, I think Healthcare isn’t what...