As World Breastfeeding Week winds down, St. Mary’s Hospital is announcing plans to provide a continuing service for nursing mothers.
St. Mary’s Family Birth Center is offering a private room available visitors, patients and colleagues who need to breastfeed or pump while at the Baxter Street campus. The room is part of a system-wide Breastfeeding Friendly Initiative to encourage breastfeeding.
“We have a room that’s really just relaxing and comfortable for patents, mother and father, if the father feels that he wishes to come. It’s a place that’s quiet and comfortable for mama, when mothers don’t feel comfortable the babies feel it too.”
That’s according to Laura Crowe, who is an International Board-Certified Lactation Consultant with the facility.
“It is important that we provide a space that mothers can breastfeed their babies whenever they want to and they feel safe,” according to Crowe.
Crowe says the room makes the process comfortable and easy for mothers.
“Pumping would not be fun, in front of other people, and so offering a place for our employees and for visitors that come to the hospital and they don’t know where to go. A bathroom is not an appropriated place to go pump. This place is clean; it has resources if they needed extra bottles we could give it to them. Most likely it has everything they need.”
St. Mary’s offers free weekly breastfeeding support groups Bundles of Joy and Toddle Time.
Experts say benefits for infants include reduced risks of asthma, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and ear and respiratory infections. Benefits for mothers include lower risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, ovarian cancer and breast cancer.
For more information, call St. Mary’s lactation office at 706-389-3310 or St. Mary’s Athens DOT org www.stmarysathens.org. St. Mary’s is an underwriter with WUGA.
