Exacto. CPS has some real systemic issues to work out, but the bottom line is, the system is either going to create a lot of false positives or a lot of false negatives. It’s just the nature of the beast. In that context, false positives are the way to go. Having your child taken from you for several months is horrible, but it’s not more horrible than having an innocent child die in an abusive home.
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But there are two things I learned from hearing about all this. A large fraction of the department workers NEVER had kids, so a lot of their ideas of how to raise kids were absolute BS and other people in the department that actually had kids had to reign them in.
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There is some truth to this, but the issue is more about everybody being rather clueless as to what the risk factors are for abuse and neglect. Parents in CPS don’t necessarily know better than non-parents - sometimes they are more dangerous because they are overconfident that they do know. The real problem is that the established research on risk factors for abuse and neglect are rarely used as guidelines. Instead people use their own gut instinct or ‘‘practice wisdom’’ and the results are that they predict incorrectly about 50% of the time. That is really pathetic considering we have predictive models that are much more accurate.
Couldn’t they at least insist on a transfer to another hospital/doctor, so that the first hospital “discharged” the patient into another qualified facility’s care?
I guess they’d probably have been on the hook for a ambulance/medical transport, but wouldn’t that at least be a by-the-book way of handling a discharge that wouldn’t trigger a call to CPS?
If they had made an arrangement at the alternate hospital first then they should have contacted the original hospital and no such permission should have been denied in the first place. Even in doing that either hospital could drop the ball and create this situation. But in the end the parents did take the child for a second opinion, so no crime was committed and there was no danger. This kind of interference in the life of this child is reprehensible. The first hospital should not have discouraged the parents from seeking a second opinion, there might even be some ethics issues if they did so, and since their only reason for contacting CPS was their own faulty evaluation they bear the primary culpability. CPS was obligated to investigate once the report was made, but the fact that there was no problem could be easily determined means that they were not actually applying reasonable discretion.
So, hospital says, “Problem!” and Kaiser Permanente says, “No problem, no treatment necessary, go on home now and be well.” Sounds about right. I’m favoring CPS just because their actions questioned Kaiser’s judgment.
You can *request *a transfer, certainly. But no, you cannot insist. Not in today’s lawsuit heavy medical climate.
There are some cases (obviously the second hospital didn’t agree that this was one of them) where a patient is not stable enough to be transported - the chances of them dying in the ambulance are too great. In such a case, the doctor can say, “No, I will not sign the order for a transfer, it’s not in the patient’s best interest.” And then you as a parent are SOL until/unless you have a judge on your speed dial. I guarantee the doctor has one on his.
The reported resolution has a strong flavor of the following:
CPS: We never did find any deficiency in the way these parents treated their baby, but hey, we don’t have to: you took your baby from one hospital to another, and that gives us the right to intervene. We now want to make follow-up visits as a way of implying that our involvement was necessary, even though there’s no actual evidence this is true. If you agree to this, you can have the baby back - otherwise, the legal battle will continue.
Parents: We want our baby back now, and are willing to accept terms we don’t like or think necessary to achieve that.