Choosing a pediatrician is one of the most important health care decisions that parents make. If you’re about to make that choice, what should you look for?

“You look for quality,” says William Stewart, M.D., of Sandhills Pediatrics in Southern Pines. “You look for accessibility. You look for a practice where you can start and build a relationship with an individual, or a group of individuals, who will provide the services that will meet the needs of your child.”

Office hours and accessibility by telephone are a primary consideration when choosing a pediatrician. Parents should look at the hours and days a practice is open, how many providers the practice has and whether or not a parent will be able to see the same provider at every visit.

Other factors are whether or not a practice offers evening and Saturday hours, and if it takes walk-ins. Afterhours accessibility is crucial, too, says Masoud Ahdieh, M.D., a pediatrician in Rockingham.

“Parents should be able to call their child’s pediatrician at any time, day or night,” he says. “It’s very important to be available to them all the time.”

Dr. Stewart agrees. “The nature of pediatrics is that kids get sick, and you need to take care of them when they need to be seen,” he says.

Another aspect to consider in choosing a pediatrician is compatibility with the practice’s philosophy. New parents typically determine this by asking questions related to breastfeeding and immunization.

“The answers often help parents determine how comfortable they are with a practice,” says Carrie Brown, M.D., of Premier Pediatrics in Southern Pines.

She also recommends that parents who are adopting children from other countries ask if the practice has had experience with adopted children. “There are a slew of problems, and parents want to find a practice that understands them, or has been through it themselves, and knows what additional labs to run,” she says.

Watching children grow
Parents want to know that a practice will support them as their children grow. “A practice should be able to help parents with parenting, child-rearing and behavior, as well as provide all the needed vaccinations and appropriate acute care,” says Dr. Stewart.

Parents may also want to know if physicians in the practice specialize in certain areas, such as asthma or attention deficit disorder.

The nature of the relationship between parent and doctor has changed in the last 25 years. “People used to take things at face value,” says Wendi Carlton, M.D., who is also with Premier Pediatrics. “Today, they want to know why you are doing what you’re doing. They want you to communicate more what you are thinking.”

According to Dr. Carlton, the Internet plays a huge role in health care, because parents use it to get information about their child’s condition. “The Internet is both good and bad,” she says. “For example, if a child has asthma, we can direct a parent to some excellent Web sites. It helps to see pictures and read information. But the other side of that is that anybody can set up a Web site and post anything they want to. If a parent misspells a term, he or she may pull up misinformation that may cause a lot of confusion.”

Parents often choose a pediatrician based on the recommendation of someone they know and trust. They figure that if their sister or best friend feels good about taking their kids to a particular pediatrician, then that might be a good choice for them, too.

“It’s a good idea to talk to other parents and find out if they have had a good experience,” Dr. Ahdieh says. Trust and confidence are at the heart of choosing the right pediatrician, and that is developed over time through good communication.

“It’s easy to go into a room, look in a child’s ear and say, ‘she has an ear infection,’” says Dr. Carlton. “On the other hand, if a child is having behavioral problems, a physician needs to take time to listen to the parent’s concerns, the teacher’s concerns and the child’s concerns, if the child is old enough to vocalize them.”

“The art of practicing medicine is the art of communicating with parents – to give them good information that they can understand, so that they will participate in the care of their child,” says Dr. Stewart. “It gives doctors a good feeling to be able to do that.”

FirstHealth-affiliated pediatric clinics*

*Many family practice offices also accept children as patients. You should check with the particular practice to make sure.