I would assume that due to liability concerns, the hospital has little to no facilities to handle something like this. Who watches the children while Mom is out of it? What happens if the girls wander off into parts unknown in the hospital and get hurt because the staff can't spare someone to keep an eye on them? What happens if the girls get bored because Mom is sleeping and decide to leave the hospital and find their own 'fun'? These are teenagers we're talking about.

Child services in NYC deals with just about anything you can or can't imagine. If you are passionate about this, engage a child service worker in any large city around you and talk to them about the conditions that some of their kids come from. It might be a bit of a shocker. This agency probably deals with intaking hundreds of kids per day - from all different types of conditions. Many of the kids are suffering from illnesses, some are filthy, some have lice, some don't know how to use simple eating utensils, some have never been taught how to properly clean themselves after going to the bathroom, some don't know how to bathe (some don't get bathed on any kind of regular basis). The intake procedures that the service follows are standardized after years of seeing what works. It seems to be a one-size-fits-all mentality, but in the end, it is designed as a common system of ensuring that children taken into care are clean, with clean clothing, and have a basic medical exam to ensure that there are no life threatening medical conditions present. Failure of the agency to do these things can result in a lawsuit, especially if a child dies or is further injured in the care of the agency. Would the procedures be different in Ft. Lauderdale, or Edinburgh for that matter? Most certainly. But NYC has their system of doing things that regardless of our sensibilities, seems to work well for them and is in the best interest of the children that they serve.