I work in a large city hospital as a certified lactation consultant. We presently have: 1. three LC's (2.5 FTE) We also have a secretary (who is more of an administrative assistant) who recently was given full time hours. 2. 7300/yr. deliveries 3. Our hours fluctuate depending on who is working. I am the person who has the most hours per week at present (.9) . I work 8am to 5pm , four days a week. The other two consultants work at the earliest 7am to 7pm or a 9am to 5-6pm shift. We cover seven days a week. 4. We cover the entire hospital. We get referrals from NICU,PP,AP, AICU, OBRR and ER and sometimes the clinic. We do phone calls and see out patients by appointment. We do pump rentals and sales as well as bra fittings and other misc. sales. We teach prenatal breastfeeding class and let doctors and nurses shadow us for educational purposes. We are presently working on expanding our lactation center to include a larger boutique that will be a collaborative effort with the volunteers who have our hospital gift shop and the breast care/oncolgy department. It is to be a women's boutique for new moms and women with breast reconstruction needs. We also find it very difficult to get everything done in a day and usually are working over our paid hours. As you know it is very difficult to go home when you have a mother who needs you or worse is crying on the phone. There is a tremendous need for our services and we are getting more and more referrals but with budgets in the hospital it is difficult to get our hours or numbers increased. As you can see we too fall quite far below the recommendation and because of this we have had to limit and prioritize who we see. We rarely see anyone the first 24 hours after birth (it is the nurses who get the mothers started and give the initial teaching) and we usually are seeing the discharging mothers first in the morning before they go home. After discharges we start seeing the others mothers (greatest need gets seen first). It is much easier the days we are fortunate to have two LC's and maybe even our secretary working. I could say more but this may not be of interest to all if you have further questions don"t hesitate to email me privately. Anna Heh IBCLC Pittsburgh, Pa. *********************************************** 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