Becky Engle wrote:

>When the baby is not discharged, our hospital has
>a policy of discharging the mother, but letting her remain in an available
>room. The mom must be breastfeeding. If her baby is not in the Special Care
>Nursery, she must room-in. The hospital does not charge, and supplies a
guest
>meal tray and linen. Mothers have used this service for one to three days.

We do almost exactly the same thing.  We call it "nesting."   It is dependent
on having an empty room--newly delivered moms have to be accomodated first,
of course.  Our thinking is that if the baby were transferred to the
pediatrics unit, mom would be encouraged to stay, to sleep in the room with
her baby, continue breastfeeding. etc., so why not keep them on our
relatively germ-free mother/baby unit instead of transferring a neonate to a
relatively not-so-germ-free unit like peds.  The service isn't available to
moms with babies in NICU, as NICU is physically separate from our unit.  Our
administrator at the time we started this was a nurse, so it was easy for her
to see that keeping mothers and babies together is good nursing care as well
as good PR.  And the cost was minimal, which helped a good bit :-) .

Judy Dunlap, RNC, IBCLC