Bringing in baby
Avoiding bath for newborn beneficial
Lindoura O’Neill will never forget that first moment she met her son, Antonio, as the nurse tucked him right away onto her chest, their hearts beating together for his first time out in the world.
“It was an amazing feeling,” O’Neill said Monday as she cradled her three-day-old son on the maternity ward at the Janeway Hospital.
Dad Cortney didn’t even know if he was a boy or girl in those first moments, not until he was turned around for the father to cut the umbilical cord.
The Bay Bulls couple had learned all about the benefits of not bathing a baby for the first 24 hours in prenatal classes and in the material they read during the pregnancy, but couldn’t say enough about the real-life experience with their baby boy, who arrived two weeks early.
There is a change in policy for bathing newborn babies, and the reasons it makes sense was unveiled in a poster by babyfriendlynl.ca last week. That poster had 30,000 hits on Facebook and shares around North America.
“It just went absolutely
viral,” said Clare Bessell, the ob- stetrics educator for Perinatal Program NL.
With the early arrival of Antonio, keeping his body temperature stable was even more important, Bessell said.
Adults might find the maternity ward a tad too warm, but newborn infants coming into the world for the first time need that toasty feeling.
“They have been used to a constant 37.5 degrees,” pediatrician Maeve Kelly said, referring to the temperature of the amniotic fluid in the womb.
There’s a problem, she said, in the first 24 hours, keeping drafts from creeping in on the babies in the ward when doors are opening and vents are blasting air.
The less interference with the baby and the natural process, the better, Kelly said.
The best way for babies to keep warm and not be stressed is to bond with their mother, skin to skin, rather than getting a bath.
It’s also believed to help the baby ease into breastfeeding more easily, fight immune diseases, keep blood sugar stable and possibly even help ward off future diseases such as asthma, diabetes and intestinal conditions.
Bessell also said low blood sugar levels is something of a worry in the first 24 hours and it’s better regulated if that bonding occurs right away and the baby is comforted.
As well, the natural fluids babies are born with have a purpose not previously thought of when they were taken off after the birth, and the infant was washed and swathed in a blanket. Instead, that protective fluid is beneficial for a number of reasons, including warmth and anti-bacterial properties.
“I think it’s a total win-win,” Bessell said.
“For many years, the routine practice in hospital was for the baby to be separated from the mother right after birth for routine care like weighing and bathing. We know now from research that the baby transitions best from life in the uterus to life in the outside world by being close to mom through skin-to-skin contact. This involves the baby being placed on the mother’s chest for at least one hour after birth.”
The decision to not bathe babies in the first 24 hours is a reversal to what was practised years ago. It was policy at the old Grace Hospital 30 years ago, Bessell said.
But sometime in the last quarter century, it was decided — for job efficiency — to make bathing and weighing the babies a routine part of the nurses’ morning duties.
Sometimes mothers would request that the bath not be done and some nurses would comply, while others were resistant.
“Some were a little stuck in routine practice,” Bessell said.
Hospitals on the west coast of the province and in Labrador were the first to adopt the no-bath-for-24-hours policy.
Hospitals in major centres, such as the IWK in Halifax, have also been practising it for awhile.