Children's Medical Center Dallas Emergency Room (ER) — Local services in Dallas

We had called the children’s health nurse line prior to arriving in the ER, as my daughter was having trouble breathing and her pulse ox was reading 91-92. The nurse said “arrive within 30 minutes, I’ll put you on the list or we need to calk 911”. When we arrived, the paramedic listened to her lungs, gave her a green sticker (we had received silver the previous time we had arrived) and sent us to triage waiting. The nurse we had read her pulse ox again, which read between 93-96 after she was weighed and sent us back to the waiting room to wait for a bed. During our 3+ hour wait, my daughters breathing declined. We FaceTimed her uncle, a pediatrician, and he said she should’ve been seen immediately due to her being asthmatic and because she was using her accessory muscles and struggling to breathe. He told us to use the rescue inhaler (for the sixth time in 12 hours) and to check back with the nurse, as what we were experiencing broke protocol. The waiting room was full. But when I went back, the 1st paramedic said “go check the other paramedics. I went to the other area, and no one was there. I waited 5 minutes and the second paramedic arrived and she read the pulse ox and was the ONLY one to check her belly or any other investigation. She saw my daughter was starting to use her accessory muscles and asked that we meet with the nurse who saw us the first time again. We waited to see the nurse while we saw said nurse talking with some co-workers. 5-10 minutes later, she saw us. Hooked us up to the pulse ox monitor again, where her o2 read between 90-92 and the monitor started alarming. She shut the monitor off and angled the monitor away. Then said “yeah, her respiratory rate has increased”. I asked when we would see a physician and she said “um, you’re 1-2 hours out”. And I asked her if she was worried and she said “no”. By this point, we had been waiting for 2 hours. An hour later, I looked at one of the screens and saw that my daughter was labeled a green 3, we’d been waiting for over 3 hours and we kept getting pushed down by level 1 and 2’s. I called my brother in law, the pediatrician, again and told him I didn’t think we’d be seen in time and to keep giving her the rescue inhaler. He was livid. I went to talk to the front desk and explained how when we had come in 3 weeks previously for the SAME EXACT SYMPTOMS, we had been seen immediately and ended up needing to be hospitalized. The paramedic said “she looks fine and that it wasn’t him who makes the priorities but the highly skilled nurses”. When I told him what my brother in law said, the paramedic replied “then why doesn’t he just treat her or prescribe her the steroids she needs. Why are you even here? We’re literally at a hospital, if your child ends up in critical condition people can help”. A woman behind him, who had been calling patients back to the ER asked what my daughters name and date of birth was and took us back.

My daughter ended up being hospitalized again. The lack of care from these providers in the ER was ludicrous and unacceptable. I took a video of my daughter the moment we went into the room, 30 minutes past her 13th dose of albuterol in 12 hours and she was struggling to breathe. If you go here and feel like your child needs immediate assistance, don’t be afraid...

I want to begin by saying that the staff we encountered were all incredibly kind and courteous. We are truly grateful for their compassion and professionalism during what was a very distressing time. However, I need to share that while kindness is appreciated, it did not lead to the care or answers my child urgently needed.

My daughter was brought to your ER in severe pelvic and abdominal pain, unable to urinate for 3 days, and clearly in visible distress. Despite this, once initial imaging came back “unremarkable,” the focus of care seemed to stop there. She was discharged still in significant pain, with a recommendation for Tylenol. Morphine barely touched her pain for 30 minutes. She is also uninsured, and this visit came at immense financial cost to our family, one we accepted because we believed her long-term health might be at risk.

Just three hours later, we were back in another emergency room, this time at our local ER, because she blacked out from pain and began vomiting.

Since our visit to Children’s she has been properly evaluated and diagnosed with a severe bacterial infection in her colon, which was also affecting her ability to urinate, causing intense pelvic pain and diarrhea. We finally received antibiotics and a plan of care in effort to began to relieve her suffering.

I want you to know this isn’t about frustration over long wait times or billing. We expected those things. This is about a child who was suffering being sent home without answers simply because the first imaging was inconclusive. The diagnostic process ended far too soon, and she was dismissed with no further pursuit of answers, despite elevated neutrophils and clear signs of immune activation in her labs.

The consequences of this oversight were intense for her, physically, and for us, financially and emotionally. It is incredibly disheartening to realize that if we had trusted that first discharge and not followed our instincts, she would still be suffering without treatment.

I hope this feedback is taken seriously, not just review her case, but to encourage a deeper commitment to whole-body evaluation, especially when children are visibly unwell. When care is kind but incomplete, it ceases to be...

My mom went yesterday with my little brother after his doctor sent them there because his foot was infected and he was worried it could’ve been in the bone. Her experience here was terrible.

The staff was horrible and unprofessional. Could easily been kinder to explain the waiting process. Jose was incredibly rude to parents. Telling them that they would wait upwards from 9-11+ hours for medical attention and wouldn’t answer questions and instead would tell them to go back sit down and wait.

He was arguing with a mother back and forth because her daughter kept having diarrhea and she was only handed some diapers. He told her they could go home. The mother told him that she had been waiting long enough and wasn’t going leave without medical attention. Jose was so incredibly rude to many other parents.

Parents should be understood, their babies are in pain. They’re advocating for their little ones and these experiences can be so traumatic.

Kids needed urgent medical attention and they’d been there since the morning. It was near midnight.

Apparently a child died three months ago because of these wait times. I hope the...