Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
Dec
3
Posted by My OB said WHAT?!?.
“You Can’t Be With Your Baby All The Time!”
“You can’t be with your baby ALL the time!” -Nurse to mother requesting to room in with her baby.
There are 25 comments to this post.
why the heck not?? Babies are meant to be with their mothers 24-7. And hey, if the baby is with the mother, that’s one less baby the nurses have to deal with…so why are hospitals so against rooming in? (yeah, I know not all are, but even SOME is too many)
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Michelle Potter Reply:
December 3rd, 2009 at 7:57 pm (Quote)
After my second baby was born I was told that I needed to let them take him to the nursery, because the nurses were getting “too busy” to let me room-in. It was never explained to me just how I was creating extra work for the nurses by taking care of my own son. Apparently if a mom wants to room-in in this hospital, she has to state this in a birth plan filed in advance so they can have “enough” nurses around to deal with all that extra work caused by the mom who feeds her own baby and changes diapers all by herself. (This was the same incident where the hospital admin threatened to call security if I didn’t give them my baby: http://myobsaidwhat.com/2009/10/22/your-baby-can-not-room-in-with-you/)
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Jessica Reply:
December 4th, 2009 at 11:47 am (Quote)
I see to remember you relating this somewhere, didn’t you threaten to call the cops? Good for you! My mom left the hospital a few hours after the birth of both myself and later my brother because, in that hospital at least, rooming in wasn’t an option if she would have stayed overnight.
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Michelle Potter Reply:
December 4th, 2009 at 12:04 pm (Quote)
Yes, I mentioned that in the comments of the post about it (http://myobsaidwhat.com/2009/10/22/your-baby-can-not-room-in-with-you/). I told her to go ahead and call security, that I’d have the police meet them. I’m a very shy person by nature, but she pushed too far.
But the point I wanted to make in response to your post was that she justified it saying that her nurses were just too busy to deal with me keeping my baby and that I should have warned them in advance that I was planning to take care of my own son so that they could have had enough staff on duty!
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My third baby was in the nursery for only 2 hours after I had her and that was too long for me. Kept requesting for them to bring her back and they acted like I was bugging them! After asking 4 times they brought her back and she never left my side again. I wish I would’ve refused them taking her in the first place!
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My first baby i had was takin out of the room every so often and i hated it. I kept asking where he was and saying i wanted him back. By the time i had my 2nd i came to my senses and demanded he not leave the room. There is no reason he shouldn’t be with me!
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Beth Reply:
December 8th, 2009 at 10:12 am (Quote)
When my son was born it was by c-section and I was so drugged up there was no way I could have taken care of him. After I suffered a year of PPD.
After my daughter was born she was taken from me because the cord was wrapped around her neck twice. Once I got her back, after the Ped checked her, she never left my side in the hospital except maybe once. They did everything right in front of me. She slept with me. I even got “approved” for early release.
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Andy (UK Midwife) had this to say,
Dec 4, 2009 @ 3:21 am (Quote)
In the UK (and in most of Europe too, I think) all our babies room in. The only ones that don’t are those that go to special care, and we get them out with their parents as soon as it is appropriate. Our special care unit is open to mothers 24/7, and they are encouraged to express as early as possible, and to breastfeed if the baby is able. The baby friendly (backed by the World Health Organisation- you can find it on their website) guidelines advocate rooming in as an essential part of the bonding process, and in initiating breastfeeding. We encourage mothers to have as much time in skin to skin as possible, and to pick their babies up and cuddle them as often as they need to. None of this ‘you create a demanding little monster’, or leave them to cry’ rubbish. Our biggest battle is with the ‘Contented Little Baby Book’, which is very popular here. It works on the premise that you can train a baby like a dog, and advises how to fit a baby around your ‘lifestyle’. I spend a lot of antenatal education time telling women not to buy it, and to burn it without reading if they have. It is in a baby’s nature to be an attention seeker, what with being helpless and reliant on us for their every need. They are quite selfish in that respect!
However, one of the benefits of our free healthcare system is that women stay in hospital until they are ready to go home (sometimes 6 days for a post-section lady). Also all inpatients care is provided by midwives. There are no nurses involved in maternity care, so the midwifery model of care is central.Women also get home visits postnatally by a community midwife for up to 28 days after birth.
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Jessica Reply:
December 4th, 2009 at 11:49 am (Quote)
almost makes me wish I lived in the UK!
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Melissa Reply:
December 9th, 2009 at 10:07 am (Quote)
I’m not sure this is typical of the entire UK. I have family there who had awful experiences of nurses telling them what they could and couldn’t do with their babies. They got out of the hospital as quick as they could!
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Andy Reply:
December 9th, 2009 at 2:22 pm (Quote)
It is true to say that we have our share of horror stories too- though all maternity care is by midwives, not nurses. There are ratbags among our profession too. The problem in UK is that services are under pressure, and staffing does get cut. My last job was in a busy unit with 5000 births a year. we were always busy and there was always pressure to free up beds. We were lucky though, in that we had 4 birth centres, where we could send women for postnatal care, so they could be spoilt before they went home. Some stayed up to about 6 days. We are lucky to be able to give community postnatal care though. The midwife’s role lasts officially up to day 28 post birth, so women can call on us up to then, though they are often transferred to the health visitor at about day 14. I am working in the Channel Islands now, which is a smaller, but better staffed unit. We have about 1000 births a year, and our unit has 5 labour rooms and 20 in-patients beds. same as the UK mainland, all care is given by midwives while in hospital, though we also have a team of nursery nurses too. There are relics of a bygone age here, too, but we are working very hard to change ideas. It is a sad fact that nowhere gives perfect care, and our publicly funded system isn’t the utopia we would like it to be. All professions have ratbags and dinosaurs that forget they are there to provide a service, and not impose their will and outdated ideas on the women we care for. Not everybody remembers that midwife means ‘with woman’- we walk a journey alongside women. In ‘The Midwife- Mother Relationship’ by Mavis Kirkham, there is a chapter by Mary Cronk (a truly great midwife- almost our equivalent of Ina May) about midwives being professional servants- ie we are paid to serve, not to dominate and control.
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Chelsea Reply:
December 13th, 2009 at 10:07 pm (Quote)
The midwife model of care should be the standard in the US, but that doesn’t mean it’s flawless. My first was born in Lancashire. My midwives were great, except that they missed a big red flag in my medical history, didn’t give me anpao even though it had been over a year since my last exam and I’d had 2 abnormal smears and irregular cells removed twice, ignored the bleeding that I had multiple times, and never checked me until I was in the triage room because I thought my water had broken, which it had, 7 weeks before my due date. I got to go on hosptial bedrest, and 5 days later I delivered a healthy baby boy who roomed in with me. It all ended well, luckily.
And the nhs is only free at the point of service, it’s paid for thru national insurance contributions ie taxes.
The US could learn a lot from the nhs, but that doesn’t mean that the nhs couldn’t also learn from the American system.
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on of of the boards there was a woman asking if there would be way to stay in the hospital longer as she was looking forward to the “free babysitting” that the hospital provided as she already had one child at home and was looking forward to just resting, relaxing, watching TV etc while in the hospital…WTF?!
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This practice drives me crazy. Hospitals act as though parents can’t be trusted with their own children even though that is exactly who that child is going home with. It is called job security and money. Nursery nurses HAVE to have each baby for a while to be sure they have something to do and hospitals have something to bill insurance companies for. The reason the hospitals act like it is so much more work for them if the baby rooms in is because they have to send a nursery nurse to get vitals, etc. on the baby in the mom’s room instead of being able to run them through the assembly line in the nursery. This is when we ask who our maternity care system in the states is really for.
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Michelle Potter Reply:
December 4th, 2009 at 12:12 pm (Quote)
Something I’ve learned is that everything a healthy baby needs (or even everything a hospital wants to do to a healthy baby that he doesn’t really need) can be done in the mother’s room. I’ve had nurses INSIST that some piece of equipment was not portable, and so the baby HAD to come to the nursery for whatever they wanted to do. But if you simply refuse long enough, eventually they’ll come to your room, because getting to do XYZ to your baby is more important to them than getting to do it in the nursery (even if your baby has NO need for XYZ.) One time I caved and let a nurse take one of my sons for something that COULD NOT be done in my room, and later my husband walked by that exact piece of equipment sitting in a hallway outside some other mom’s room. (I don’t recall what it was, maybe a scale?)
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I’m glad our hospital was good about it, though I did have a nurse the first night who kept wanting to take my baby so I could rest. I did let her take the baby for the hearing evaluation, and I dozed off. When I woke, my baby was still not back and I had to request that she bring my daughter to me. That’s the only time we were separated. I can’t ever imagine trying “train” my baby or making the baby’s schedule fit my wants and needs. Parenting just doesn’t work like that.
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Hey, how come my home birth midwives didn’t tell me this important piece of information?!
When someone asked me how long they let me hold my baby after she was born, I said, “for about two weeks!”
I did go through the horrible separation with my first one. It’s enough to make a woman wonder whether she really had a baby or if maybe she just sat on something sharp!
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