Due to COVID, families were holding off receiving care because they did not feel comfortable visiting a medical facility. Dr. Leibovitz explains the importance of having continuity of care, especially when children are so young.For information about Mount Sinai-Union Square - General Pediatrics visit https://www.mountsinai.org/locations/union-square/services/pediatrics or call 212-844-8300
Hello everyone. My name is Doctor Lebowitz. I am the associate medical Director a Mount Sinai Union Square in pediatrics. So I first want to say I'm very excited to be on this call and on this zoom call. You know, the continuity of care is so important for general pediatrics. I mean think about, we see kids when they're born eight times in one year and that continuity extends also throughout their lives. And we pick up on so many things during that time And what I think especially with COVID-19 and I understand it because it was a scary time in the early part of March. A lot of families did not want to show up and it wasn't just didn't show up here in pediatrics, didn't show up to school. So now you don't have teachers or coaches or other mentors that could have picked up on something that could have gone or is going wrong in a child's life. So even more reason for the Children and the parents to bring their Children to the pediatrician, so that we make sure that there is no medical issues that is either needs addressing and that could be prevented, you know, but by picking up sooner, so let's think about it, how many kids come into our practice? Most of them are doing well, but a lot of them have some delays. And these delays come both in development delays like speech delays or fine motor or motor delays. You know, a lot of these kids have either a chronic illness like asthma and sometimes their treatment protocol is not working well. So the risk of not seeing us is both from the social delays, the mental delays, the physical delays. And also my concern is a lot of these kids have been home and that social isolation has also caused a lot of these kids who may have underlying anxiety to manifest with more anxiety. And I think my biggest thing that I want to take out of it is that as adults, we have to teach kids as well in a balanced approach. And every family has to do it differently, how to navigate during stressful times. And a pandemic is a very stressful time for families. So how do we navigate that? So that the kids know that, you know what there's risks in life, but there's benefits as well and the benefits of senior pediatrician, making sure that you get the right here is so more important than the risk that we have in terms of contracting covid. Well, I mean, I've always advised even before pandemic, anything that we can prevent, and that's what I loved about general pediatrics were there to prevent stuff to empower the families, that there's medicine available in vaccines available to prevent illnesses and flu is one example, you know, and my concern now is you have a lot of people who didn't want to take the flu shot before Covid was here and now with a both a pandemic and possibly a flu outbreak, you have a co infection. And that could even overwhelm the hospital even more. So we have 16 medical conditions we can prevent. Let's keep the flu um, as one of them so that we can, you know, prevent that as well. Because right now it's what December 15 we just started yesterday to get the Covid vaccine into, you know, in new york, it's gonna take some time for that to kick in. But now we have the flu vaccine. So make sure you get your flu vaccine as soon as possible. So we see Children from the day they are discharged from the newborn nursery, the Nicu. So they could be as young as two days old And then we see them as old as 18, sometimes 19 if they have chronic illnesses or a lot of a lot of our older patients, they don't want to, they kind of like the general pediatrics, it's hard for him to just leave us and we see most of our kids are healthy. But we have a lot of kids with complex medical history and luckily for us, we have three pediatricians here. We speak english, some of us speak spanish and Russian and Hebrew. And the cool thing is that we also have, we could do labs and vaccines and we offer so many different specialists that they can come here in Union Square and see as well. So let's take a matter. We're in Union Square. So Union Square has seven different trains, multiple buses that come here. You come inside and it's a beautiful building. It's five floors of all the different medical care and services you can can ask for. You have urgent care, you have radiology, you have a lab center and when you get to pediatrics you have a nice, beautiful waiting room, a nice aquarium, a friendly staff. We have books for all the kids. And and one of the things that I think we stick out is we are trying to empower the kids as well of the families to empower them to make the decision. That is best for their kids and empower the kids to learn that they also have a voice. And I think that's what makes us unique. So I think the best thing is to just give you an example. So a few months ago we had a mom and a child both test positive for Covid and it was a newborn and the coordination of care from the newborn nursery to telling the physicians to the call center to coordinate with the nurses when the mom can bring her child to working with security. So at the time, this was all new to us to make sure that the mom would be escorted into an elevator on her own to create a room for her and doing it in a way with dignity requires a lot of team approaches. And I think for the mom, she felt not only that she was taken care of, but she wasn't like just a, you know, an outcast that she had Covid and her childhood. And remember this isn't, we're talking about March and april where we're still very new to this, to this illness. Okay. Another team approach I give you, we had a child that had some abnormal physical findings, some abnormal labs and I was able to get them on a telemedicine the same day, get into uh an imaging study two days later and it was hospitalized and got the medical care that would normally would have taken maybe two months to complete a diagnosis. So, first of all, in Union Square, everyone in the building must wear a mass. So when you come into the building, there's a screening team that basically checks for your temperature. Ask you questions about covid exposure and any any patient or child that has fever or some illness that concerns them. They first make sure to call us in the practice to say, hey, this is a child or you know, that has the following symptoms. Is it okay to send them up? So we get the heads up as well on the way up to the elevator. It's limited to a few people Paride. There is you know, pure L um products everywhere around the building in the waiting room. We have social distancing. And also what we do is we limited to only one parent is allowed in the room. And I think the the night team as well also cleans the entire rooms every night with a terminal cleaning. And I think with all these precautions were definitely taking all the necessary steps to keep Children and their families, you know, um of you know, preventing from getting covid. Well, yes, yes we do. We started we were kind of late in the game but we definitely got started once the pandemic started because a lot of families wanted to stay connected to us. And this was another option available. So yes, we do offer it. So let's think about again. So you have an amazing location. You have a very friendly staff. The family can get an entire care in one building. So that's both the parents, the Children, if the grandparents bring them in as well. And on top of that we we have a pedes friendly atmosphere. Um and I think all those are such winning attributes to the location and for the staff. So the easiest thing is to call, it's 212-844-8300. I think I have the number here. So again, 2128448300 And you know what? People google things. So if you google Mount Sinai Union Square pediatrics, you will find us as well. Some have the app, my chart and Zach docs as well. That's these are all ways that they can reach us.
