Hospital should feed breastfeeding mums?

[NurseRosie]

AIBU to think that if your baby is in hospital and Mum is staying as fully breastfeeding, the ward should feed Mum? The NHS is not spending money feeding the baby as mummy us making the milk. Baby feeding sometimes 2 hourly and very clingy as unwell. Ward have only given tea and biscuits. Restaurant expensive and open funny times, for example baby upset over lunch yesterday so didn't get down until 2 and they'd stopped serving hopt food for the day. Do you think they should offer mum a meal?

How can you max out credit card in 10 days eating food from a supermarket? You can easily eat for reasonable amounts from m and s.

Jesus Christ, that's rude. Why would you assume anyone would lie about that? You have no idea how close that poster may have been to the limit before the hospital admission.

Epic x-post fail.

Thanks though Kondos.

I was close to the limit. That was the problem.

My bigger issue is the extortionate cost of car parking rather than the food! I dread to think how much I have spent on car parking in the last 7 years!

I was in 20yrs old with 6wk old Ds. In 4 days and 3 nights I was offered one cup of hot chocolate from a kindly nightshift auxiliary. My Dh brought me sandwiches and I managed a quick meal when I ran home for a shower once. It wasn't a comfortable experience.

I was recently in hospital with DD3 and was able to have sandwiches, fruit ans juice for free. As a PP said, perhaps it depends on the area.

You can easily eat for reasonable amounts from m and s

Let them eat cake.

At my Trust the food is very expensive and you could easily pay about £8 a time just for a standard meal and when a mother is having to pay this twice a day it soon adds up if their child is in for a few days or more.

There is a supermarket near our hospital but it is a good 20-25 minute walk so if the mother wanted to go and buy some food she'd be away for well over an hour and although it's not impossible for a BF mother to do this it's not as easy as it would be for mothers of formula fed babies where nursing staff can feed those babies in the absence of a mother.

We also see a lot of instances where grandparents/relatives come in for periods of the day to relieve the mothers so they can go home and get a good meal or they mind the baby whilst mom and dad pop out to a local restaurant to eat but this isn't an option for breast feeding mothers as they need to stay with the baby.

The reality is that it is not as easy for breast feeding mothers to get food because they have to be resident with their baby in a way that formula feeding mothers don't.

And when a sick child's only source of nutrition is via its mother then yes that mother should be fed to ensure her nutrition is as best as it can be in order to meet the infants nutritional needs.

We provide formula to FF babies and I can absolutely guarantee that the cost of that far outweighs the cost of giving a BF mother a small hot meal twice a day.

We don't begrudge giving out formula as the baby is the patient but nor do we begrudge the cost of feeding a BF mother to ensure her baby is getting optimum nutrition either. I imagine it costs the NHS less money to feed a BF baby's mother twice a day than it does to provide 8 formula feeds a day to a bottle fed baby (the Trust can only have the pre-made bottles of formula).

We do ask that parents bring in their own milk in order to reduce the cost but some of them look pretty disgusted at that suggestion. A lot of parents think we should provide nappies too but we are a 20 bedded unit and we'd be giving out about 150 nappies a day if that was a service we provided.

We do pay car parking charges for any car that is parked in Trust Grounds overnight to try and relieve some pressure off the parents and that probably costs the Paediatric Unit about £1'200 a month.

The whole issue of cost to parents is really complex and we see a lot of families struggling and being in difficult situations and we just try and help where we can.

If we have food left over on the lunch/dinner trolley then we will offer it to parents who aren't breast feeding and when a child gets admitted to the ward I will offer the parents drinks, sandwiches, crisps etc whether they're breast feeding or formula feeding because they've no doubt been sat in A&E for hours are are starving as well as worried.

Word to the wise.

For anyone looking forward to surviving a future hospital stay on 'bunches of bananas' - the tiny M and S hospital branch I had access did a great range of overpriced smoothies, Christmas party food, boxes of truffles etc. Not so great on the staples. It's as if they had a captive market or something...

X post with writer.

BF mothers are fed at my local hospital and also formula milk is still provided too

So Writer why can't they bung a ready meal in the parent's room microwave?

green - I'm pretty sure they would do if we didn't feed them, but we do. We keep the mother fed because the baby depends on her nutrition for its own. It seems really obvious to me that breast feeding mothers would be fed.

But they don't need to be fed. They can provide their own food like other and in some cases far needier parents have to do. They will still provide perfectly adequate milk haven eaten irratically for a few days.

A worried mother is a worried mother. 1 getting better provision stinks.

But they don't need to be fed. They can provide their own food...,

On that logic why do we feed any patient? Why can't parents just bring in food from home for the children? What's wrong with the paediatric patients living off microwave meals, bananas and sandwiches?

We feed them because nutrition is an important part of healing and we don't want any patient to be at a disadvantage so they are all fed to ensure every child has equal opportunities to correct nutrition. By potentially putting the nutrition of the BF mother at risk we are putting the breast fed baby at a disadvantage because it's not nutritional needs are not being catered for in the same way weaned children or bottle fed infants are.

They will still provide perfectly adequate milk haven eaten irratically for a few days

Are you an infant health and nutrition expert Green? Or a lactation consultant? Milk supply often suffers when mothers are stressed, dehydrated or not eating nutritious meals. Trusts usually feed nursing mothers - that's not for shits & giggles.

But how does eating a ready meal over crap hospital food put a baby at a nutritional disadvantage?

Soooo breast feeding mums should be seriously watching what they eat. Funny you are constantly hearing on here that breast feeding mums can take medication,drink alcohol and eat shite without having any impact on their baby.

greenfinger - because we know that if we are feeding the mothers they are not going without. If as a Trust we didn't feed the mothers there's no guarantee they are going to be eating properly for lots of reasons that have already been mentioned.

For a BF baby to recover it has to have adequate nutrition/breast milk and the only way to ensure that will happen is to make sure the mother is eating and drinking properly.

If I'd had to stay in hospital with ds, I'd still not be able to eat the muck that is offered, even if I was still breast feeding. This entire thread bewilders me because I've yet to see a hospital meal that actually looks edible, never mind nutritionally sound. I remember being given Macaroni Pie (dry macaroni cheese in a scotch pie case) with chips. Oh, how I laughed.

If parents are expected to never leave their child's side then of course the hospital must either provide food or look after the child while the parent goes to the canteen or reception for delivery food. As other's say, they could charge for it, although why you would want to eat it is beyond me. Far preferable to ask family or friends to bring a flask and a home made snack/salad.

YANBU. At my local Trust the policy is to feed BF mums (not formula feeding ones though). My Trust also provide formula to babies though

Soooo breast feeding mums should be seriously watching what they eat. Funny you are constantly hearing on here that breast feeding mums can take medication,drink alcohol and eat shite without having any impact on their baby.

Is that news to you?!

Yes - a sudden drop in calorific intake can affect milk supply. If anything, poorly babies want to feed more, and a nursing mother's milk supply needs to increase.

And certain medications and alcohol are safe as the molecules don't pass into breastmilk in significant amounts.

Yes. And our local hospital (kings in south london) does. It was a great help when I was admitted with a desperately ill 13mo with pneumonia.

The way I see it is that stress and nutrition are probably two of the biggest factors that can impede on breast milk production both of which are issues when a baby is hospitalised. Why on earth wouldn't we want to do everything we can to try and preserve the mother's breast milk supply? In a Country that is so grow rare to improve its breast feeding rates then why would we jeopardise already established breast feeding relationships by not providing the mothers with nutrition?

*so desperate to improve its breast feeding rates