With more than 5,000 babies entering the world each year at UTMB in Galveston, providing the best possible care to mothers, babies and their families is of the upmost importance.
UTMB was recently selected as one of 100 hospitals across the country to join the EMPower Initiative to enhance maternity care practices and work toward achieving the Baby-Friendly USA designation. Funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, EMPower is aimed at increasing breast-feeding rates throughout the U.S. and promoting and supporting optimal breast-feeding practices toward the ultimate goal of improving the public’s health. As part of this effort, UTMB will receive training and resource support in lactation education.
Over the past few years, UTMB has made great strides in emphasizing practices that promote breast-feeding among patients. That includes placing infants in “skin-to-skin” contact with their mothers immediately after childbirth, encouraging “rooming-in” or keeping babies in the room with their mothers and out of the nursery, and providing breast-feeding support to all new moms. In 2014, UTMB was named a Texas Ten Step facility, a key step in acquiring Baby-Friendly status.
Tina Carter is one of five lactation consultants at UTMB. She has seen the percentage of mothers who exclusively breast-feed from the time their baby is born at UTMB to when they leave the hospital go from five percent to 25 percent over the past three years.
“The results have been huge,” said Carter. “However, the national benchmark is 50 percent, so we are going to keep working. And we need to support mothers after they leave the hospital, too. While about 80 percent of babies born here are breast-fed for some period of time, we see breastfeeding rates fall even more after three, six, nine months. Breast-feeding is a huge health initiative – study after study has shown that breast milk beats formula not only for baby’s health but for mom’s, as well.”
Carter says she sometimes sees nine moms in one day, providing encouragement and helping them overcome any difficulties they may be having with breast-feeding.
Yuri Villarreal, a third-time mom from Hitchcock, was grateful for all the support she received at UTMB after her son was born “tongue-tied.” This means that the frenulum, or the band of tissue that connects the bottom of the tongue to the floor of the mouth, is too short and tight, which affected her baby’s ability to breast-feed. At 3 weeks old, the baby underwent a small procedure to release the frenulum.
Carter will meet with moms anywhere in the hospital – from the labor and delivery unit to the emergency room. On this day, she went to the recovery room where Villarreal’s infant was immediately placed on her chest after the procedure. After a few moments of uncertainty and a few tips from Carter, Villarreal noticed immediate improvement in both her comfort level and the baby’s ability to nurse.
“I am so happy — he hasn’t had a drop of formula,” said Villarreal. “I was worried I wouldn’t be able to continue breast-feeding because he had a hard time latching on, but the support has been amazing and now I feel like he’ll be able to breast-feed for a long time.”
Her first two children were born at other hospitals, and she said she didn’t get the support she needed to succeed at breast-feeding.
“I was 16 when I had my first child, so I was clueless,” said Villarreal. “When the nurse asked me if I was going to breast-feed or bottle-feed, I said I wanted to breast-feed. She said, ‘OK, well good luck with that.’ I’m not kidding. So this experience at UTMB has been so much better.”
Carter said she’s happy that she could help Villarreal have a better experience this time around, but stresses that becoming
Baby-Friendly is truly a team effort, with UTMB leadership, RMCHP clinic partners, and hospital physicians and nurses all playing important roles. The Sasser Family Foundation has also provided funds to support ongoing breast-feeding efforts.
And while breast-feeding is a large component of becoming Baby-Friendly, Tracey Santiago, Mother-Baby nurse manager, says it’s more about supporting family-centered care by providing information and letting families make their own decisions.
“We don’t tell mothers that they have to breast-feed, but we want to give them the tools to make the best decisions,” said Santiago. “It’s what’s best for each individual patient and their situation.”
Santiago said more changes are in the works to help UTMB become the third Baby-Friendly hospital in the Houston/Galveston area, including providing more “couplet care” by having one nurse take care of both the mom and baby, rather than having a post-partum nurse taking care of the mom and a nursery nurse taking care of the baby.
UTMB plans on being ready for Baby-Friendly designation by September 2017.