Changing the culture of mother baby separation in one Northeastern hospital

“I got to touch him once and they took him right away from me,” Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center labor and delivery nurse Jennifer Wickett says, remembering the birth of her first child 19 years ago.

Wickett desired non-medicated births, but her three children ended up being born via cesarean sections for various reasons. Wickett’s personal birth experiences coincided with her early professional life, working at a hospital in Massachusetts as a labor and delivery nurse.

At the time, she explains, the process was this: the baby was born,  taken to the warmer, vitals and weight were recorded. The baby was wrapped in a blanket and held next to mom’s face for five to ten minutes and then taken to the newborn nursery.

Skin-to-skin in the OR, Healthy Children Project

“I hated that for my patients and I hated that for me,” Wickett says.

So Wickett singularly started changing that culture of mother baby separation.
Now, at Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center, Wickett attends about 95 percent of the c-sections, and she says she was able to “take control.”

“[Initially] I wasn’t tucking baby in skin-to-skin, but I was putting baby on top of mom with the support person helping hold the baby,” Wickett explains.
She deemed it the Wickett hold: baby placed chest down on mom with knees tucked under the left breast and baby’s head on the right breast.

Attending a Kangaroo Mother Care Conference in Cleveland galvanized her efforts: the evidence clearly supported skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth and beyond.  Fellow nurses, anesthesiologists and other team members were resistant, but Wickett and a few other fellow nurses who created the Kangaroo Care Committee kept at it, always leading with kindness and communication. Rather than approaching the process with an “I have to do this” agenda, Wickett involves and acknowledges all of the participants in the room.

For instance, to the mother, she asks permission while also explaining the importance of skin-to-skin contact.

“They’re in hook line and sinker when I explain that their body regulates their baby’s temperature,” Wickett explains. “They don’t want to give that baby up; they are not letting that baby go.”

To the anesthesiologist, she facilitates open communication. Wickett lets them know that she assumes responsibility for the baby. “Are you good?” she often checks in with the anesthesiologist, while minding their space to work safely and efficiently.

Wickett  makes certain to involve the partner in their baby’s care, asking them to keep a watchful eye over mom and baby.

Photo by Jonathan Borba

Just about half of the babies she sees begin breastfeeding in the OR, she reports. From the OR, babies are kept on their mothers’ chests as they’re transferred to the recovery room, continuing the opportunity to breastfeed. All in all, Wickett says that babies born by c-section at her hospital spend more time skin-to-skin than those who are born vaginally.

After a vaginal birth, eager nurses often disturb skin-to-skin contact to complete their screenings and documentation. Excited partners wanting to hold their baby tend to do the same.

In the OR though, Wickett says there are at least 30 minutes without these disruptions.  Once mother and baby are transferred to the PACU, mothers report decreased pain when skin-to-skin is practiced.

What’s more, Wickett reports hearing often “This baby is such a good breastfeeder!” because the babies have an opportunity to initiate breastfeeding within the first two hours of life.

The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that immediate, continuous, uninterrupted skin-to-skin contact should be the standard of care for all mothers and all babies (from 1000 grams with experienced staff if assistance is needed), after all modes of birth. The recent Skin-to-skin contact after birth: Developing a research and practice guideline synthesizes the evidence. [Read more here.]

Skin-to-skin, Healthy Children Project

Wickett and seven other colleagues had the opportunity to complete the Lactation Counselor Training Course (LCTC) last year.
While she says she would have loved to have been able to take the course in-person, Wickett still found the material and resources “fabulous.”

For the past four years, there’s been a vacancy in the perinatal coordinator position at her hospital, so Wickett hopes that her new credentials will allow her to fill the need.  In the meantime, Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center offers outpatient lactation visits. The center’s breastfeeding support groups halted during the height of COVID and have yet to resume; Wickett reports that they are trying to bring those back virtually.

Additionally, Maine residents have access to the CradleME Program which
offers home-based services to anyone pregnant up to one year postpartum.
In partnership with the Mothers’ Milk Bank Northeast , Northern Light Eastern Maine Medical Center became the first milk depot in the Bangor area.

You can read more Our Milky Way coverage on skin-to-skin after cesarean birth in  Skin-to-skin in the operating room after cesarean birth , The Association Between Common Labor Drugs and Suckling When Skin-to-Skin During the First Hour After Birth , and Skin to skin in the OR.

Also check out Skin to Skin in the First Hour After Birth; Practical Advice for Staff after Vaginal and Cesarean Birth Skin to Skin.

Find some beautiful KMC imagery here.

A collection of stories by and about those in the AANHPI community

Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Breastfeeding WeekTelling our own stories. Elevating our voices— is coming to a close.

On Friday, the U.S. Breastfeeding Committee AANHPI Caucus presented the AANHPI Lactation Community Forum, an open panel discussion where AANHPI community members shared about their journeys to becoming lactation support professionals as well as provided guidance on how we can further build community capacity to support AANHPI families.

Photo by Samrat Khadka on Unsplash

Other opportunities as part of the celebration included visiting the Asian American, Pacific Islander, and Native Hawaiian Breastfeeding Week Facebook page and engaging with activities like the AANHPI Coloring Pages Contest. The Alameda County’s Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander (ASAP!) Breastfeeding Taskforce AANHPI Social Media Toolkit produced shareable social media content including messages and captions in the toolkit which have been translated into 11 different AANHPI languages: Chinese (both traditional and simplified), Farsi, Hindi, Hmong, Japanese, Korean, Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Tagalog, and Vietnamese.

In an engaging discussion from last summer, Tonya Lang, MPH, CHES, IBCLC and Grace Yee, described the diversity that exists under the AANHPI umbrella, shaking away the stereotypical idea that Asian culture is monolithic.

The Asian Pacific Institute on Gender-Based Violence begins to describe the complexity of AAPNHPI groupings and the forces that shape identity in Census Date & API Identities. AAPI DATA, which provides demographic data and policy research on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, compiled some wonderful visuals to help shape the numbers.

The overgeneralization of the API community has led to some misleading data about breastfeeding rates. On an aggregate level, initiation and duration rates are relatively high, but the statistics don’t account for stark disparities within these population groups. This piece covers this phenomenon in more depth and offers strategies for tailoring infant feeding support in the Chinese American population.

As Dr. Magda Peck has pointed out, numbers and data are important because they drive decisions and policies, but they also have the potential to sanitize humanity. That’s where stories come in. Not only do they humanize the numbers, they can also help us make sense of the data.

In celebration of AANHPI Week and in hopes of demonstrating the complexity and diversity of this population, we have collected several stories by and about those in the AANHPI community.

Photo by Dragon Pan on Unsplash

First up, is To-wen Tseng and her contributions to the San Diego County Breastfeeding Coalition’s blog. Tseng wrote most recently about her ‘why’ reflecting on National Breastfeeding Month. Read that piece here.

Joanne Datangel-Gallardo, MD, DPPS of the National Children’s Hospital, Philippines has worked extensively with relactation efforts. Read about Dr. Datangel-Gallardo’s work here.

Also out of the Philippines is a piece by Micaela Papa detailing how breastfeeding saved one baby’s  life and helped her mother recover from the stress of Typhoon Odette.

Not far south from this archipelago, is the island nation of Timor Leste. Here, emergency response efforts to protect breastfeeding have saved the lives of many. Community members manage and intercept artificial baby milk and other ultra-processed food product donations among other components of the nurturing care model. Read about these efforts here.

In Indonesia, efforts are also underway to combat commercial milk formula companies. Find a simple model for reporting Code violations here.

Jenny Lei Ravelo writes about the tangle of infant feeding complexities on Indonesia’s remote islands complete with stunning photos in partnership with the 1000 Days Fund.

In India, the Foundation for Mother & Child Health (FMCH) works to empower families from vulnerable communities with actionable information and services, resulting in health seeking behavior and nutritious food choices in order to tackle maternal child malnutrition, ultimately breaking the cycle of poverty. Read about the organization’s impact here.

In the spring, the Asian Pacific Islander Breastfeeding Task Force (APIBTF) a part of Breastfeed LA, tailored the Dietary Guidelines for infants and toddlers for Chinese and Vietnamese communities, a project that augments APIBTF’s sister organization Alameda County’s Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander (ASAP!) Breastfeeding Taskforce’s Continuity of Care (CoC) Blueprint Project Prenatal Toolkit for AANHPI families. You can find out more about the efforts to center culture in health here.

Elisabeth Millay/BreastfeedLA and API Breastfeeding Task Force

Also exemplifying culture centered in health is the Hmong Breastfeeding Initiative (HBI). With funding from Reducing Disparities in Breastfeeding through Continuity of Care Identifying Care Gaps grant from National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), the Hmong Breastfeeding Coalition (HBC) conducted an environmental scan of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minn.) on breastfeeding promotion and support for child-bearing age Hmong women and families. Read more here.

Tiffany Pao Yang has played a crucial role in this work. The daughter of Hmong refugees, she is especially invested in helping change the narrative around infant feeding in the Hmong population. Read part of her story here.

 

More to explore

 

Breastfeeding in Emergencies: The Struggles of New Mothers in the World’s Largest Refugee Camp

A Journal of Aboriginal and Indigenous Community Health: Community Influences on Breastfeeding Described by Native Hawaiian Mothers

Breastfeed LA’s Current APIBTF Projects

API Breastfeeding Task Force Video Library

AANHPI Lactation Collab 

The Cost of Not Breastfeeding from Alive & Thrive Downloadable PDFs for several Asian countries

Gestational carrier provides milk for babies born via surrogacy

Erin Graham suffered six bouts of mastitis and a subsequent antibiotic allergy while breastfeeding her firstborn. Moreover, when her daughter was just five weeks old, Graham required emergency surgery for gallstones she’d developed. The care team reported that she would need to pump and dump her milk on account of the anesthesia, but Graham made a point to connect with a lactation care provider who dispelled this misinformation.

Photo courtesy of Erin Graham

Despite it all, Graham persevered and went on to breastfeed her daughter for a year.

When her son came along, breastfeeding proved much easier.

“Breastfeeding my son was a piece of cake,” she recalls.

Becoming a mother was the most transformative and defining experience of her life, Graham goes on to say. So, when she witnessed friends and family members struggling to create and grow their own families, she felt especially touched and inspired. That’s when she applied to become a gestational carrier (surrogate). Graham has given birth to three babies as a gestational carrier since then and has pumped milk after each pregnancy.

The decision to pump milk for her surrogate babies started with a simple conversation early on in the surrogacy process, during match meetings where prospective surrogates and intended parents connect. Graham says there was never any pressure from any parties.

“It was all just gratitude and positivity,” she remembers. The first intended mother she worked with would even make her snacks to help keep her energy up while pumping around the clock.

During her first two experiences, the families were local, so they would coordinate meet ups to drop off the milk. She and her family became quite close to both of the families, so she found herself sometimes pumping at their houses during get togethers.

After her final surrogacy, Graham and the family coordinated shipping through FedEx, and while Graham says she’s  heard horror stories of lost and thawed milk upon arrival, she never experienced any of these misfortunes.

When one of the families decided that they no longer needed Graham’s milk, she was connected to another family whose surrogate was unable to provide milk. Graham wasn’t ready to wean, so she provided milk for this infant instead. It’s one of her favorite infant feeding stories.

Graham shares how her experiences breastfeeding and pumping were so different. While breastfeeding, Graham says she never thought about how many ounces of milk she produced; instead, she focused on her babies’ cues. While pumping, she didn’t have the babies’ cues to prompt her, so she’d rely on an alarm and found that she became quite focused on her output. Pumping also required her to hone in on her organizational skills, making sure the freezer bags laid just right so that she could store and package them most efficiently.

Graham has remained deeply connected to the infertility and surrogacy space and has worked for a surrogacy agency and fertility marketplace where she helped both intended parents and surrogates find the agencies and clinics that fit their particular needs and desires.

In order to best serve her clients, Graham recently completed the Lactation Counselor Training Course (LCTC).

Having had the vastly different experiences of directly breastfeeding her own babies and pumping milk for her surrogate babies, now coupled with the LCTC training, Graham offers a unique perspective to her clients.

Graham has been featured in a GoStork Q&A where she offers more of her experience as a surrogate and fertility care advisor. You can find that here.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changes their breastfeeding policy for HIV-infected mothers

Without major announcement, in February 2023,  the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) changed their breastfeeding policy for HIV-infected mothers and no longer recommend advising against breastfeeding.

Photo by Paul Hanaoka

The new recommendation gets closer to the updated 2010 World Health Organization (WHO) guideline on HIV and infant feeding. Before 2010, “WHO guidance on HIV and infant feeding (UNICEF et al., 2003; WHO et al., 2006) recommended an individualized approach in which women living with HIV would be counselled on feeding options according to their household circumstances.”

The new CDC guideline acknowledges that, “For mothers on antiretroviral therapy (ART) with a sustained undetectable HIV viral load during pregnancy, the risk of transmission through breastfeeding is less than 1%, but not zero,” as determined in the PROMISE Study.

The guideline goes on to recommend “patient-centered, evidence-based counseling on infant feeding options, allowing for shared decision-making.” Read the full document here.

Organizations like the National Institute of Health Office of AIDS Research, the Infectious Disease Society of America and National Association of County and City Health Officials announced the new guidance, but it has gone largely unacknowledged in the field of lactation.

“This change in HIV policy serves as a reminder to always check sources. New research findings and policy reconsiderations make it imperative that the most up-to-date information is available to the families we serve,” Healthy Children Project’s Karin Cadwell PhD, RN, FAAN, IBCLC, ANLC comments.

Photo by Wren Meinberg

In the U.S., HIV diagnoses among women have declined in recent years; still, nearly 7,000 women received an HIV diagnosis in 2019. (The CDC has commented on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic: “Data for 2020 should be interpreted with caution due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on access to HIV testing, care-related services, and case surveillance activities in state and local jurisdictions. While 2020 data on HIV diagnoses and prevention and care outcomes are available, we are not updating this web content with data from these reports.”)

How does the U.S. compare in their recommendations to other high-income countries?

The British HIV Assocation’s 2018 guidelines for the management of HIV in pregnancy and postpartum states that “Women who are virologically suppressed on cART with good adherence and who choose to breastfeed should be supported to do so, but should be informed about the low risk of transmission of HIV through breastfeeding in this situation and the requirement for extra maternal and infant clinical monitoring” among other recommendations for helping manage lactation in HIV-positive mothers.

Photo by Laura Garcia

A National Health Service (NHS) Greater Glasgow and Clyde document Management of infants born to HIV positive mothers reads: “There is now evidence from developing countries that breast feeding while mum’s viral load is fully suppressed is safe, and BHIVA/CHIVA no longer regard a decision to breast feed as grounds for referral to child protection services. For HIV positive women who choose to breast feed, maternal HAART should be carefully monitored and continued until one week after all breastfeeding has ceased. The mother’s viral load should be tested monthly to ensure that HIV virus remains undetectable; this testing will be undertaken by the obstetric/ID team. It is recommended that breastfeeding be exclusive, and completed by the end of 6 months.”

You can learn more about Canada’s approach here and Switzerland’s here.

For more, check out  Lacted’s Clinical Question and the CDC’s Preventing Perinatal HIV Transmission.

Centering and celebrating cultures in health: Dietary Guidelines for infants and toddlers for Chinese and Vietnamese communities

During the first week of April each year, the American Public Health Association (APHA) brings together communities to observe National Public Health Week. This year’s theme  is Centering and Celebrating Cultures in Health and highlights the importance of fostering cultural connections to health and quality of life. 

Last month, we celebrated National Nutrition Month, an annual campaign by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics which highlights the importance of making informed food choices across the lifespan.

Photo by Angela Roma

A beautiful example of the convergence of these two themes is work being done by the Asian Pacific Islander Breastfeeding Task Force (APIBTF) a part of  Breastfeed LA, tailoring the Dietary Guidelines for infants and toddlers for Chinese and Vietnamese communities. This project augments APIBTF’s sister organization Alameda County’s Asian, Southeast Asian, Pacific Islander (ASAP!) Breastfeeding Taskforce’s Continuity of Care (CoC) Blueprint Project Prenatal Toolkit for AANHPI families. The prenatal toolkit was adapted from an existing toolkit in Alameda County, and is available in English, traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese.

The initiative is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Division of Nutrition, Physical Activity, and Obesity (CDC/DNPAO). NACCHO selected seven communities to strengthen community lactation support through the implementation of the Continuity of Care in Breastfeeding Support: A Blueprint for Communities from November 2022 to July 2023. The purpose of this project is to support the implementation of CoC strategies by local-level organizations among oppressed communities with historically low rates of chest/breastfeeding. [https://www.naccho.org/programs/community-health/maternal-child-adolescent-health/breastfeeding-support#early-childhood-nutrition]

Photo by Roderick Salatan

 

The dietary resources which include an Educational Handout from Dietary Guidelines, Nutrition Resource Directory, and social media posts can be found here, available in English, Chinese and Vietnamese. The materials include a dietary guidelines hand out with two toddler-friendly recipes (with a fun suggestion to use green onion to decorate steamed eggs), three social media messages with a timeline for infant feeding, human milk recommendations, and complementary food recommendations, all commonly eaten in Asian communities. The deliverables are full of color and easy to navigate. 

Judy Li and Cindy Young presented their work during NACCHO’s The First 1,000 Days Nutrition: Improving Nutrition Security for Infants and Toddlers in Communities of Color where the Improving Infant and Young Child Nutrition during the first 1,000 days in Communities of Color summary report was introduced. 

Li, Young and their team’s work was community-informed, standing by the sentiment, “Nothing about us, without us.” The team spoke with community members about eating habits and learned that families do not eat according to the MyPlate graphic. Instead, they enjoy their meals in family-style servings from bowls. Recipes developed were tested by community members with children and tailored according to their suggestions; for example, the addition of different dipping sauces.

Participants also offered feedback stating that they appreciated the accessibility of the ingredients. 

 

Helpful links

ASAP!’s Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Social Media Toolkit 

National Public Health Week’s shareables and toolkit (available in Spanish)  

USDA’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans (2020-2025)

The Association of State Public Health Nutritionists (ASPHN) brief on Transition Feeding 

Public Health Nutrition Deserves More Attention

Undernourished and Overlooked