I am coming out of "lurk-dom" to follow-up on previous posts I have made to
the list asking for information from hospital-based LCs.  To catch everyone
up on the list...Last September I requested that hospital-based LCs give me
information about the FTE to birth rate per year for their hospitals. For
those of you who don't speak "administrative lingo" FTE stands for Full-time
equivalent.  One FTE works 10 eight-hour days out of 14 days.  A 0.6 FTE
works 6 eight-hour days out of 14, etc.

Many, many of you from all over the United States responded to my inquiry,
and I posted the results of that survey to Lactnet.  The purpose of my
survey was to make a proposal to initiate a full Lactation Service at my
hospital....currently there is none. Since hospitals of differing sizes
responded I converted all of the information supplied into an FTE rate per
1000 births, to ease the comparison.  In my survey I found that the average
FTE to 1000 births was 0.7.  Meaning that for every 1000 births there was a
Lactation Consultant available 7 out of 14 eight-hour days.  In my proposal
I was not happy with that ratio, and knew that in any good negotiation one
must ask for more than they are willing to accept.  Therefore, I instead
calculated the results based on percentiles.  I chose the 75th percentile as
my goal and asked for 1.4 total FTEs for Lactation Consultants in my
proposal to the Administrators of my hospital.  For those of you who can do
the math, that would equal out to one LC for 8 hours every day of the week.


Finally today the Administrative Board met and approved a position of 1.0
FTEs, for my hospital this corresponds to about 0.8 FTEs per 1000 births,
this exceeds the average from my survey.  To say that I am excited is
certainly an understatement.  It took me 5 months to get this position
approved (I hope that it does not take as long to get someone hired, since
all of the administrative paper pushing is certainly not over yet).  I don't
know when a "real" LC will begin work.  But the hardest part is over, and  I
will take one victory at a time!  Once again to all of you who responded to
my inquiry, I send out another hearty "Thank you!"

Renece Waller-Wise, RNC, CLC

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