Hi! I've been looking for a net site for LC's for months--it's wonderful to
find the Lactnet. I'm a hospital-based LC in West Virginia. Our hospital,
which does about 3800 deliveries/year, is the only one in the state to have
LC's on staff in that capacity, and our BF rate has risen from 41% to 55%
since
the BF support program was instituted 4 years ago. There are two of us--I'm
full-time and my collegue, Yvonne, is half-time. We could be cloned several
times over and still have work undone, but it's a wonderful job. At this
time, we see all inpatients, see several outpts/week on an informal basis,
call moms a few days after discharge, and take BF questions on our
mother-baby unit's help line. We also write policies, provide inservices for
the staff on the unit and work with the midwives, peds and OB clinics, peds,
NICU, and PICU units, and the peds and OB residents. We're working on
becoming baby-friendly. We take every
opportunity to talk about BF in the community and in the local media. We're
in the process of planning a follow-up weight check and an outpatient BF
clinic because of our concern re early discharge.
I'd like to know if any other hospital-based LC's have developed
inpatient protocols for neonates who don't feed well (or at all) in the first
day of life. We seem to have a large number of babies who don't nurse for
hours and hours after delivery, and to this point, we've just been working
with them on an individual basis, but our staff, which includes many new,
relatively inexperienced (with BF) nurses, doesn't feel comfortable with this
when we aren't there to help them. Do you do sequential blood sugars? Urine
specific gravities? (I never understood how this could be helpful, when so
many babies don't void very much initially.) Follow a timetable? Base on
weights and/or gestational
ages? I haven't been able to find anything in the literature which provides
guidelines, and I'd really appreciate any suggestions or experience from the
rest of you. Thanks!
Judy Dunlap, RNC, BA, IBCLC
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