Every time I go to a conference, or do a project, I realize that it doesn’t matter what hospital you’re from, where your hospital is located at, or what your clientele is like…everyone experiences the same barriers to change.  Recently I attended a NICHQ project, where our goal was talking about how to keep moms and babies together, in order to ultimately improve breastfeeding rates.  I learned that some hospitals were doing better than us, while some hospitals were just starting to think about implementing changes to keep moms and babies together.  It was so great to talk to women from hospitals from all over Texas, because we realized that we’re all in the same boat. A large part of nursing is learning from others.  We don’t always need to reinvent the wheel, but we need to pull from every source we can so we can get to the same place, which is a healthier mom and baby.

Last year, one of the hospitals I work with made a huge change….they changed from an LDRP with a traditional nursery to an LDRMB (I don’t think that’s a real thing, but it’s Labor, Delivery, Recovery, & Mother Baby Unit)  We initiated it through our Shared Governance program, which caught the attention of our administration team, because we were applying for Magnet status.  They quickly got on board and gave us tons of support.  It took about 6 months of planning (all planning was led by our unit-based shared governance team), and then we just did it.  We closed our nursery and implemented routine skin-to-skin contact immediately after vaginal and cesarean deliveries.  Two passionate people iniated a change that transformed an entire unit, and I always believed this change would one day affect an entire community.

Right around the same time we were implementing all of these changes, a new hospital was being built.  Needless to say, we had a huge turnover.  But I held the same view as my director….good riddance.  If you are not interested in taking care of a family unit, if you’re not interested in what evidence repeatedly tells us is the best thing for mother and baby, if you can not cope with change, then see you later!  And the funny thing is, some nurse’s left because of the changes, and ended up coming right back.  I think they realized that these changes were happening everywhere!  We also hired some super great new nurses, and our new mother-baby approach would be their norm.  I think we all need to remember when we’re making changes, and we’re afraid of how staff will “take it,” we can do everything we can to make the change easier for everyone, and to prepare for it, but ultimately, the ones who leave we probably didn’t want around anyway. 

Until my next delivery ❤