The Channer Family: Our Hospital Tour...

Yesterday, we had our hospital tour at Winnie Palmer Hospital for Women & Babies. What did we think about it? Well, I'm not going to lie, but man the place looks great. The first thing you notice is the architecture. It's very unique. The building is well lit with the use of natural light which comes through the building's many many windows and quite secured. everyone entering the building most go through a security check in. Id's are checked and scanned and a badge is given out. On the badge, it has the name of the person, date, picture, and floor or room clearance. The folks at the front desk and security area were friendly. I liked this.

And so our tour began. First stop we made was the checking area. When the moms come in, they and another person would go to this area, get checked in, and then taken to her room. While in the room, they get the mom tested and hooked up to what ever monitoring machines needed. They only allow the mom and 1 other person during this time. All the other visitors have to stay in the waiting area which is located downstairs. But the waiting area is large and beautiful. Lots of chairs and from what I saw, 2 large flat screen TVs.

Once mom is all checked in and test and all that's done, then they allow 3 people at a time to be in the room. Those 3 people are whomever the mom wants and if you have a number of people, they can rotate. The rooms are a fairly nice size. They all have large windows, full bathrooms, not shared, flat screen wall mounted TVs, the monitoring device is wireless, there is wireless Internet, and the best part, if we wanted to carry our game system to hung up to the TV, we could :). When it comes time to have the baby, then it's mom plus 3 other people in the room.

After baby is born, there is a monitoring area right there in the room where the nurses can do their testing of the baby. After about 2 hours or so, mom and baby are carried to her recovery room. The mom, baby and 1 other person will have a tag and when the baby is carried to the nursery, the mom or the other person can go along. Oh here is the other security that I liked. All the babies' bracelet's has a sensor, that if it gets too close to the emergency exits, an alarm is activated and the floor locks down. Cool huh? Once everything is cleared, then it's back to normal. Other than that, you have to pass the nurses table and all babies are checked to see if they are with the right person.

The recovery room is also nice. Once again, large windows, private bathroom, TV and DVD player with access to free DVDs. Mom can get room service for food or massages or stuff like that. The way they said, was that they didn't want it to feel like a hospital, instead more like a spa.

I think the only thing which I didn't like was the parking. The parking was a little bit of a walk, unless you had it valeted, and since this place is fairly popular, it can be crowded at times. But the $4 for parking you play, covers 24hrs.

Is this where we were going to choose to have our baby? Don't know yet. We have the choice of 2 other hospitals. We have seen one, not on a tour but was there quite a bit. It was cool.

Here are some pictures.