I just spotted this article in the Herald Sun, part of the Melbourne
hospital's Good Friday Appeal.

"RCH handles thousands of bottles for hungry babies"

<http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25281014-24331,00.html>

~~~

HUNDREDS of hungry Royal Children's Hospital babies need bottles of
milk every four hours. Each sick baby must have their own special
bottle and the Royal Children's formula room has the enormous task of
making sure the tiny patients have just the right mix of milk to grow
big and strong.

Every day inside the huge kitchen more than 500 bottles of specially
blended formula, breast milk and allergy liquids are made every couple
of hours and delivered to the wards.

Doctors order a specialised dietetic formula for each little patient
so each baby's bottle must be tagged, labelled and then individually
prepared. It is stored in a giant fridge and then delivered to mum or
dad just in time for feeding.

Room supervisor Marie D'Souza has been mixing milk for 20 years and
said only once did the hundreds of look-a-like bottles get mixed up.
"Many years ago the wrong bottle went to the wrong baby, but it was
out of our hands," Mrs D'Souza said. "It doesn't happen often."

The right formula can make the difference between a good stay or a
great stay. "We are the stomach of the hospital, we have to be very
accurate and the feeds are very complicated," she said. "We have to
always be very precise. We are helping them get strong just like the
doctors."

Mothers can also deliver bottles of expressed breast milk to the
formula room where it will be frozen for up to three months or until
their baby is well enough to drink again.

Most babies in the hospital are too sick to feed so the breast milk or
formula is given in tiny portions through a tummy tube.

Little Sophie Mawson was this week admitted to the hospital because
she couldn't drink properly and was losing weight. Doctors discovered
the tubes in her tummy had constricted and once they cleared the
blockage six-week-old Sophie was back sucking down six bottles a day.
Mum Mary Ellen said the RCH formula service was like meals on wheels.
"It's a great holiday from sterilising bottles. "It was one less thing
to worry about in hospital," she said.

~~~

Talk about normalising artificial feeding! The milk room which deals
with both mother's milk and formula is called the "formula room", and
breastmilk is relegated to barely an afterthought (breastfeeding seems
to not exist at all).

And the boasting about mixing the right formula for babies "to grow
big and strong" - that's not just normalising artificial feeding, it's
idealising it. And they emphasise it twice.

There's certainly nothing there about breastfeeding or breastmilk
being by far the best way to ensure these sick babies have a chance at
life.

Argh.

Lara Hopkins

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