Fiona,
                Hello from a fellow Australian! I have been reading with
interest any letters from others here. Iam a midwife currently working in
Special Care Baby unit at the Bendigo hospital in Victoria.

In my experience of 10 years or so in midwifery and mainly SCBU work at
that, I have only seen a handful of cases of nipple confusion in premies.
Most of our prems quite happily take both breast and bottle feeds with out a
problem.I believe the bit about the baby forgetting to suck is a furphy, its
never happened to me.Cup feeding is an option at this early stage but most
staff are not prepared to "fiddle" for long with a baby when there are lots
of others waiting to be fed.

The only other thing I can suggest is that if the hospital has "rooming in"
facilities, she rooms in for 24-48 hours to exclusively breastfeed when the
baby is closer to going home.

It is a difficult problem but as I said in my experience prems are happy to
feed from either "container" as long as they get fed!!!


Regards Janelle