It’s Hollywood’s clichéd newborn-in-hospital scene: A nurse carries a swaddled baby into a nursery full of other swaddled babies, while family members admire from a large viewing window. Twenty years from now, this might prove to be an antiquated concept, and HealthEast’s Woodwinds Health Campus in Woodbury is one of the major players in making sure that it is.
Woodwinds’ new standards are highlights of its recent certification under the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative, part of Healthy People 2020, a national health initiative introduced by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 and sponsored internationally by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Woodwinds is one of only five hospitals in Minnesota to receive the certification (two other HealthEast hospitals join it), and among only seven percent of all hospitals in the nation to receive the certification.
The mission of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative is to raise awareness about the health benefits of breastfeeding, and to have 90 percent of all women breastfeeding for the first six months after birth by the year 2020. The Baby-Friendly certification is largely an effort to help meet the goals of this initiative, and many of its standards revolve around breastfeeding and educating new mothers. Women who give birth at Woodwinds are taught the keys of successful breastfeeding, and are given additional support in breastfeeding after they leave. A lactation consultant checks in with every woman two to three days after the birth, and the hospital even has a consultant on call for mothers who need extra guidance.
But the Baby-Friendly guidelines take effect long before the first feeding. From the moment the baby is born, Woodwinds has a unique and purposeful approach: Almost immediate skin-to-skin contact with the mother ensures that the baby picks up her good bacteria. In fact, 23 of the newborn’s first 24 hours will be spent with the mother. “What happens the day of delivering and the first three days are so important ... It significantly impacts the health of the baby in its life to come,” says Jeanette Schwartz, Woodwinds’ maternity clinical director.
And Woodwinds has committed to backing this claim up: Nurses receive 20 or more hours of specific training, and all of the departments are Baby-Friendly—trained or educated in some way. “It’s all about creating the most comfortable environment for mothers and their new babies,” Linda Johnson, retired maternity care patient education and lactation coordinator, says. “If a mother goes into radiology for a scan and is asked to drink a dye, we want our radiologists to be able to say that it’s safe, with certainty, and say, ‘This is why...’”
It may seem like great lengths to go to, but mothers who have been through the hospital are appreciative. Margie Meier, who just had her third birth at Woodwinds, says that she kept returning because of the great experiences she had in her previous births. “In my first birth I wasn’t feeling too prepared,” Meier says. “It was amazing to have so much support here and along with that, the research to back it.”
Achieving this certification was a long journey; Schwartz has had a vision for the program for over a decade. Schwartz, Johnson and Carol Busman, clinical nurse specialist, maternity care center, have chaired the initiative for over three years, when they came together to make a plan. “We had to change the way we were thinking about it all. It demanded a culture change,” Johnson says.
And this is a change that Schwartz, Johnson and Busman say must make its way beyond the hospital walls. They call for more mother-centric facilities and more baby-friendly communities, which they believe will go far beyond impacting just this specific population. Schwartz says, “It’s about the mother and baby, yes, but with this we can improve the health of our communities, and then ultimately, the health of our nation.”
For more information on the Baby-Friendly national certification, go to babyfriendlyusa.org or healthypeople.gov.
