Hospital policy (hmm or is it routines...) certainly impacts the number of
babies spending the night in the nursery, but I think even more it's nurses
who are
 1) "protecting" mothers and "pampering" them by "letting them get some
rest" (you owe it to yourself, dear)
    2) trying to keep a job they love in the middle of the night (put on the
rocker bed and you can play computer solitaire)

...may the night nurse gods protect me.

I tell couples in Lamaze classes about the benefits of having your baby with
you - sometimes I'll even say, "Why send your baby back to the nursery if
the baby is quiet and sleeping?  Certainly you can consider 'grandma
service' in the middle of the night if your baby is very fussy and you need
the sleep."

Another thing that helped us was having one uniform hospital charge whether
the infant was in the nursery or in the room.  We do mother/baby nursing as
much as possible in a small (350 births/yr) hospital, LDRPs, nursery still
there because we get reverse transfers from a tertiary unit.  But switching
to mother/baby during days and eves has definitely changed nights, and not
making changes in the paperwork depending on where baby was spending time
made a difference too.

And what was that study -- mothers with infants in room slept avg 5 hrs 25
minutes, infants in nursery 5 hrs 20 minutes -- the rule is nobody's getting
much sleep in the hospital!

Dawn Kersula, Green Mtn Mama, in beautiful southeastern VT where the world
is a riot of lilacs and crabapple blossoms

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