Editing Preparing for a Newborn (section)

=== Meet and Greet ===

Many of my friends reported going to a meet-and-greet with a paediatrician before picking them. However, when I called various practices here in San Francisco, they told me that if I decided to go with them what I should do is notify the obstetrician who I'm going with and they'd send a doctor over to see the newborn post-birth.

Some of our friends told us it was very valuable:

{{Blockquote
|text=We picked out and met ours beforehand with Kaiser. 

I was glad to have gotten to know her a little bit before coming into our first appointment when my brain was fried. 

Pediatricians can also have some good insight about pregnancy and the birth process and choices during labor because OBGYNs are focused on the birth while pediatricians are focused on the baby afterwards. I asked one of my friends who is a pediatrician a bunch of questions about amniocentesis, fetal monitoring, vacuum, etc. 
|author=Anne
|source=SMS, 16 months after first child
}}

Others told us that the first time was useful but also that we shouldn't worry too much about it because changing your paediatrician is easy:

{{Blockquote
|text=We had one for [our first child] and that was useful, but perhaps they were only doing that because it was during COVID. No idea, but we didn't have one for the second, but I suppose that's because we were experienced by then.

I can put your mind at ease about this. 8 months after [our first child] was born we had to move because we bought a home and we had to change paediatricians anyway. While we did go through the research process again, it wasn't like a good one was hard to find.

I would just copy and paste what you were looking into for an obstetrician. Yelp has some reviews, but Google Reviews have a lot more.
|author=Avinash & Anisha
|source=Phone call, 18 months after second child, 3.5 y after first
}}

Overall, I would be happy to place myself at the mercy of fate to start with, but the other thing I found out did make me a little nervous, especially since the concierge paediatricians in SF ''do'' offer meet-and-greets.