Leading the Way to Ensure Breastfeeding is Available & Safe While in the Hospital

Breastfeeding and mother’s milk provides short-term and long-term benefits to babies at every stage of life. Mothers also benefit from breastfeeding and/or pumping to provide expressed milk for their infant.

The World Health Organization promotes “supporting mums to breastfeed anytime, anywhere.” Intermountain Healthcare encourages breastfeeding and provides education about breastfeeding benefits, educational resources, and support groups.

At Primary Children’s Hospital we support breastfeeding while you and your infant are staying with us, even offering hospital grade pumps if your infant is not able to breastfeed.

Support for Breastfeeding at the Hospital

What is being done to support breastfeeding and using mother’s milk at Primary Children’s Hospital? In August 2015, we opened the Mother’s Milk Center - the first centralized milk center in Utah. Preparation of mother’s milk is no longer done by nurses at the bedside or on the inpatient units. This saves time, allowing nurses to take care of your baby and ensures your milk is handled in a safe and standardized way.

The Mother’s Milk Center at Primary Children’s Hospital is open everyday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. It is staffed by knowledgeable, experienced technicians. The Mother’s Milk Center is located on the third level of the main hospital next to the auditorium.

Safe Handling of Mother’s Milk in the Hospital

On average, 50 patients per day at Primary Children’s Hospital have mother’s milk feedings prepared in the Mother’s Milk Center. Standardized practices are used to keep milk safe when it arrives, when it is prepared, and when it is sent home with discharged families. These practices and processes are used nationally in milk centers at children’s hospitals across the country. Some of these practices include:

• Labeling all mother’s milk with a bar code. This bar code is scanned during milk preparation and when it is fed to your baby.
• Bar coded patient ID labels are applied to EVERY bottle of mother’s milk. This practice is used in the milk center and throughout the hospital, wherever milk is stored.
• Staff uses multiple safety checks. As technicians review infant diet orders, calculate the correct amount of mother’s milk to use, and prepare the requested amount for each feeding from doctor’s orders
• Milk is delivered everyday to inpatient units. Extra delivery of mother’s milk is done as requested.
• Mother’s milk technicians check refrigerators in units twice each day to pick up stored milk.
• When a family is discharged, all milk is double checked before it is given back to parents to be taken home.

We encourage parents to speak up if they have any questions about their infants feedings as well as any practice performed in the Mother’s Milk Center.

If you would like to speak with a Lactation Consultant contact one of our technicians or your nurse. They can help setup a consultation.

We are excited to be able to provide this service to our families as we promote, protect, and support breastfeeding and the use of mother’s milk while in the hospital.