Hi Marsha,

       Our Lactation Center has had an in-house rental/retail station for 5
years now. We have only M_____ pumps, primarily because M____ presented us
with a better start up package initially. We could do both, however among
the hospitals in our county, none of them use the H_____ pumps.

We decided that to carry an inventory from both companies would take a lot
of staff education and lots of additional storage space. When I approached
H______ about carrying a few of their products, H_____ never responded; as a
result we do not. I would not mind carrying some of the products. We do
carry products from other companies (not pumps, my choice not theirs), and
do not feel obligated to carry everything from M_____. We have rental 60
pumps in our inventory as well .Patients seem happy to obtain pumps from us,
and at the present time, the only other supplier is another hospital. We
tried initially to "give people a choice," but if they were inpatients, they
often just wanted to take a rental home.  If the customers were outpatients
or warmline calls, they often preferrred to see us anyway because we knew
about their needs. There are no medical supply companies in the area that
carry rental pumps.

As for staffing we try to manage it all. The store is in a secure location
and people cannot just wonder thorough. As a result the LC might be paged
from a patient room to serve a customer, not an ideal set-up, but one we
currently live with. We are deciding at this point if we need more IBCLC
hours or secretarial support - both would be nice.

I would love hearing from other hosptial based LC's - do you use anyone
other than an IBCLC to do warmline and followup phone calls and if so, how
do you assure their competency - by continuing education requirements or
what? Do any of you have LLL leaders do volunteer or paid  work from a
hospital based mostly IBCLC program?

TIA and good luck Marsha,

LuAnn Smith
York, PA








The retail center as good as it is



_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp

             ***********************************************
The LACTNET mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned
LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(TM)
mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to:
http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html