Choosing the right person to be your child's pediatrician is far more important than some parents might believe.
This is the person who may, sometime in the near future, be making decisions for treatments that could alter the life of your child for good or bad.
This decision is probably going to be one of the biggest you will ever make.
One of the most common ways that parents set about choosing their pediatrician is to ask for referrals.
This can be from your own physician, your family, your friends, people in your parenting group, or through doing a doctor search on the Internet.
Doing that kind of search on the Internet is going to give you a lot more information than you might get through personal referrals, and can be extremely handy if you have no other resources available.
You can get the same kind of referral based on experience or familiarity with their kind of practices through your physician, but the best kind of information possible will often come from other parents, because they are more familiar with the kind of emergencies that can happen.
One of the most important things you want in a new pediatrician is to know how they handle emergencies, especially how they handle children in an emergency.
Once you have enough referrals, it is time to start calling their offices to get some general information.
General information starts with, as it always does when it comes to medical care, with the financial portion of it all.
What insurance plans will this doctor accept? What kind of financial information does his office require prior to a visit? Does the doctor require a professional referral before accepting a new patient? Get the paperwork questions out of the way quickly, because the most important questions are best handled face-to-face.
You should be able to narrow the list of possible doctors down through the usual insurance questions, as well as what hospitals they are affiliated with and whether they ever do emergency appointments.
Those who are left are the ones you should begin meeting face-to-face.
A lot of parents want to find a doctor who thinks along the same lines they do, especially when it comes to health issues and the treatment of their children.
This can be just as important as their bedside manner because it will go a long way to developing trust between the parent and the doctor.
When you meet for the interview, with your child, if possible, for a general examination, that would be the time to ask his opinion on health issues you strongly believe in, such as immunization, breast feeding, or alternative medicine.
This will also give you a chance to see how he or she is able to interact with your child in a non-emergency situation.
How your child interacts with their potential physician is the most important factor, in my opinion, to choosing the right doctor for them.
If there is something about this new doctor that makes them uneasy or fearful, they may not like coming to them on a regular basis.
Your child has to be able to communicate with the doctor as well as you, because only they know where it really hurts, or how badly their tummy feels.
We can interpret for them, but only they really "know" what is going on inside them.
If they feel comfortable enough to really interact with the new doctor, then you have found a winner.