Keeping babies from being taken to the nursery

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Angela and quagmire,

3rd that. Don't have nothing else of my own to add to this.

Thank you.

Even the AAP says that everything should take place in the same room with the mother, but unfortunately many hospitals do not allow this.

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The last hospital I delivered in DID allow the parent (aka DAD) to be with them during eveything, but it was all done in the nursery away from me. I think they are still within requirment by allowing Dad to come. Well that is not good enough for me.

I could have easily gotten around it by refusing to let them take my baby but I can NOT *force* them to give my baby medical care of any kind in the room with me. Their policy is if I do not allow them to take the baby to the nursery then I forfit all pediactric care. I'm sure if there was some kind of emergency they would have cared for my baby but I chose to let him go to the nursery with Dh because he did have some complications at birth and for my own piece of mind I wanted the ped to look at him again. Looking back I'm not sure I would do it again like that. I refused many things like then bathing him, giving Hep B, etc. (anything that would keep him there longer). Well he ended up staying in the nursery for 2 extra hours on top of the normal time because they overheated him and it took 3 peds to figure out why he had such a high body temp. Guess they didn't know how to deal with the warmer times and settings on a baby who did not have a bath. Pathetic.

My point is I don't see anyway around being able to keep MOM with baby the whole time in many hospitals unless you forfit all care no matter how much of a stink you make. Hospitals are just too lazy to personalize themselves for room by room treatment.

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Yes, definitely! Right after he was born the doctors worked on him for a while because he wasn't breathing, but as soon as he was ok they gave him to me and I tried to nurse him but he wasn't interested. I kept trying but nothing and then I finally got him to latch on just as the nurse came in to take him to the nursery. I had to fight her to be able to finish nursing him...well my doula did most of the fighting for me so I didn't have to stress...LOVE her!!! But I can just imagine if I had been a FTM or unsure of myself I would have given in to their threats.

So strange because the hospital was so awesome about giving me the birth experience that I wanted...no interventions, they just left me alone, they didn't even make me have a heplock and never tried to get me to do anything I didn't want to do, I couldn't have asked for anything better. It was after the birth were I realized how much I hated the place. I should have just checked myself out right away but I waited 24 hours.

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That was one of my big reasons too!

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I prefer the word "decline" it sounds less hostile ... and can be less offputting to caregivers but Informed Consent and Informed Dissent are topics that EVERYONE should know more about!

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This was a big issue for us too. DD *had* to be bathed, and it *had* to be right then. I wanted it done in our room but they said her body temp would drop too much. So I said fine I'll go to the nursery and they wouldn't let me out of bed

So to summarize, mom is trapped in bed, baby is to be carted off elsewhere for all procedures according to hospital policy.

I realize that this isn't the case for some hospitals, but there isn't one hospital within a 90 mile radius of me that doesn't have a nursery and even the baby-friendly hospitals don't count temporary separation as "not rooming in" It's really irritating.

If I ever need a hospital again, god forbid, I will definitely have someone advocating for us other than myself and DH... an outside midwife or a doula. It's helpful to have that third party support.

Totally depends on your hospital and their staff. When my son was born, he NEVER left my room without my husband. Immediately after birth, they wanted to bathe him, and I said, "No, I'd really like you to teach me how to do it - and I can't be attentive to that right now. How about tomorrow?" I played to their "you know stuff that I don't know" (which is silly - I know how to bathe a baby)... and they never came back to bathe him =)

About an hour after birth - when my doctor was done repairing my tear - they asked for permission to bring him over to the warmer (6 feet away in my room) to weigh and measure him. Geof went with and took picture of the whole thing. When we had to change rooms (the regular LDR floor was full - I delivered in the NICU delivery room), my husband pushed the "plastinette" down the hall to our room while I walked with a nurse. The only other time he ever left my room was for his PKU/hearing test - and my husband went with him and never left his side... even held him for the test.

All the rest of the time, he was in my room... and mostly on my breast. He slept in my bed. The only time he was in the "plastinette" was for when I needed to change his diaper/clothes, and when we took our own hospital pictures right before discharge.

We never had to be nasty or stern about it. We did have it in our birthplan that whenever baby needed to be away from mom, dad would be present (didn't ask - just stated). But even the nurses asked my husband to accompany them to the PKU/hearing test. I think I have a great hospital!

when i had my son, i thought that you were supposed to be separated from your baby so that people could look at them in the nursery window. He had his first feeding from me, but the nurses "let me rest" and had him in the nursery overnight. I did sleep, but that was from all the drugs that they pumped into me that i thought was normal too. UGH!

When i had my daughter i was better informed, and had my dad let me (was living with the folks at that time--their house, their rules) I would have happily homebirthed. As it was, I hospital shopped. I checked out my 2 large hospitals in the city and both were going away from the LDR and back to switching rooms after giving birth. Both tours, the nurses were upset that there weren't any babies in the nursery to show me, and both had said in so many words that they weren't happy with all this rooming in stuff. I RAN AWAY!!! I found a small community hospital that had LDRs, all the nurses had breastfed their kids at one time, and the nursery was big enough for one plastinette. Granted there were only 3 LDRs with a reg room for just in case, but i knew that i'd get the care that i wanted.

Lily slept in my bed, breastfed at will, and i was allowed to be attentive. the only time that she was out of my sight was when my parents took her to the family lounge while i was trying to deliver the placenta (more intense than the birth and i could not concentrate enough to hold her and nurse.) Lily even slept in her plastinette in the bathroom while i took a shower.

It wasn't until after a disappointing birth that i educated myself, and had i known my rights before hand, i think that the hospital stay would have been better. I agree that slipping pamphletts in here and there letting parents know that they have rights to refuse/decline treatment is a great idea. it may make 1st birth much happier

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My DS was in the NICU for 4 weeks, and this was a non-issue at my hospital. They didn't allow kangaroo care ( , but they were very gung ho about getting breastmilk into baby and letting mom and dad be the one to do it. For 2.5 weeks, DS needed to be tube fed, because he was just too young (gestational age) to have the suck/swallow/breathe reflex. But if I or my DH was there, we got to do the feeding - holding him in our arms, and holding the syringe up while it drained my milk into his stomach. They also had a plastic bin in the freezer with my name on it for me to put my milk in any time I was there. Plus I could go in one of the nursing rooms and use the pump anytime I wanted.

There are bad NICUs still, but alot of them are getting much better, especially when it comes to breastfeeding. Mine is still a bit backwards in some things (ie, kangaroo care, holding the baby for long periods of time, etc.), but the nurses called my colustrum "liquid gold", and they said ANY amount, even a drop, was worth handing over. It's hard to get colustrum into a bottle, so it usually only was 1-3 drops, but they'd mix that with formula until my milk came in. And yes, I agreed to that because my baby was small and very much premature and needed to feed and grow as soon as possible! My milk didn't come in until around day 5. So in that case, he actually did need the formula. A full term baby that's able to nurse on mom obviously wouldn't need it. Once my milk came in, he got 100% breastmilk the rest of the time.