"Do we need to have an influx of breastfeeding experts come there and
lecture and lecture and lecture in order to change this unseemly
professional behavior towards mothers and babies? If you need this, please
know that many of us would step right up to that duty. : ) Kathleen"

Thanks - I wish this would happen! But we do have lots of exellent IBCLC's,
and breastfeeding counsellors, midwives etc here in the Netherlands. I think
it just so happens that my particular area is lacking in this department.
There is a newly qualified IBCLC in the same town as the hosptial who is
thinking about applying to work there.

I'm not sure about the rest of the country. I think that it is just this
hospital which is very regional, it seems that the message has not got this
far yet. I have worked as a volunteer in a larger Dutch hospital where there
was a good bfeeding protocol, with a IBCLC available. I've heard lots of
positive things about other hospitals but these are the larger, sometimes
acamdemic,  hospitals. For example, I understand that in Nijmegen they do a
lot of good work in their NICU with regard to breastfeeding and feeding
expressed milk(?). When I asked in the local hospital here why their
protocol was so out of date and explained to them how it was in other
hospitals in the Netherlands they just said that from an organisation point
of view it wasn't possible - uh?
I think that the hospital I was in is just too disconnected with what is
going on in the larger hospitals and really needs to get up to date. Maybe
some schooling on the matter would be useful. I like your offer of help but
I'm not sure how open they would be to this. I too have been thinking about
how this attitiude could be changed and believe that the best way to start
would be to get into contact with the Dutch org. that deals with the BFHI
and see what they say. It was actually very hard to express my griefs during
my stay, but a few of the nursing staff were very sympathetic, especially
one who was always available (like she lived there!) and had received some
extra schooling on breastfeeding. Luckily, it is not normal to stay more
than a night in the hospital (except for c-sections and other medical
problems in mother or baby) and mothers are soon at home under the care of
the local midwives.

It also has opened my eyes. I talk about rooming in and feeding around the
clock, looking for signs of wakefulness so you feed you can feed your
newborn on demand in my courses. Of course this can't happen if your
separated for 7 hours at night. In this hospital the babies are bought to
the mothers or v.v. if they awake at night. I guess it depends on when they
were born, but my guess is also that some newborns will just remain in a
deep sleep in their cribs if they do not have any physical contact to remind
them where the breast is. Not sure on this though as I've never observed
newborns left in cribs for such a long time. I'd also like to know what the
nurses use as an indication of "waking up" for a feed - do they bring them
to their mothers when they come back into light sleep, start to move hands
etc or when they start crying? If its when they start crying, then they've
probably missed several chances of feeding a newborn.
The whole problem has had to make me rethink how I handle this issue in the
breastfeeding course. I've got to be really tactful when explaining rooming
in, knowing that if a mother gives birth in this hospital then she'll have a
fight on her hands to keep her baby with her at night. But at least my own
experience has taught me that it is the mothers choice whether they (the
hospital) like it or not. Maybe I can start a trend in the right direction.
Anyway, I'm going to give it some hard thought over the next weeks on how to
handle this so that if more women in my area start to shout they won't blame
it on the mad English women they had in a few months ago.

groetjes

Sara Bernard

ps did I mention the discharge packs with the bottle! - really, not tongue
in cheek.

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