The hospitalization of babies should not interrupt or be an impediment to exclusive breastfeeding. However, in many cases this does not happen and hospital protocols, rather than the medical needs themselves, become a barrier to cohabitation and breastfeeding.
In this sense it is necessary to be aware that the hospitalization of a baby should not, if it is not a really justified case, be a barrier so that he can continue to receive breastfeeding on demand if he was taking it.
In this sense, a group of researchers from the Federal University of Bahia, in Brazil, have recently published a paper that analyzes precisely the problems that exist in order to maintain exclusive breastfeeding in hospitalized babies.
They took as sample ninety-seven children in the Infant and Pediatric Unit of the Hossang Pediatric Center of Oliveria. Among the factors that compromised breastfeeding were the physical limitations of the hospital, the lack of a health team specialized in guiding mothers, and the absence of breastfeeding promotion programs.
Half of the hospitalized children they were breastfeeding exclusively at the time of hospitalization but 35 percent of them received formula milk upon admission.
As the authors explain, many mothers who breastfeed do not find in the hospitals an infrastructure or organization that favors the maintenance of breastfeeding, and neither, because they feel vulnerable due to the hospitalization of the children, do they find support from the toilets that can guide them.
Although the study refers to Brazil, it can be extrapolated to the situation in many other countries, where there is no legislation that requires hospitals to organize so that mothers can breastfeed their babies on demand, making this much more complicated, It has negative effects on babies, which lose the nutritional and immunological properties of exclusive breastfeeding and also causes an increase in health spending with the purchase of formula milk.
Some of our readers may have gone through the terrible moments of having their babies hospitalized and I would like to encourage them to share with us how the experience turned out and if permanent contact with the child and breastfeeding were hindered or favored during their stay.
I do not know if in all Spanish hospitals the maintenance of breastfeeding is favored during the admission of a baby, but my opinion is that hospitalization should not interrupt exclusive breastfeeding if there are no medical reasons of much weight for it
