Mothers, babies to meet opioid challenge together
Top state official tours NICU at Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC
There are medicines and technologies available to help infants born in withdrawal from opioids, but Kristen Maguire prefers a low-tech solution.
“The mom is the baby’s best medicine,” said Ms. Maguire, the director of the Mother-Baby Unit at Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC.
The typical treatment plan today, though, separates the mother and the baby for days, or sometimes weeks, after birth, while the hospital monitors the infant for the effects of withdrawal and sometimes uses declining doses of morphine to ease the symptoms. UPMC is hoping to change that, starting early next year, its executives told a top state official Wednesday.
“We are now opening a unit specifically designed for mom to room with baby” while the baby gets medical help and the mother is trained in caring for her child and herself, said Elizabeth Krans, an investigator at the MageeWomens Research Institute. She hopes the unit — initially six rooms — will not only improve bonds between the baby and mother, but also save lives.
“We saw spikes in overdoses and overdose mortality in the postpartum period,” she said, and if the hospital can reduce the depression and stress common to new mothers and encourage recovery, the whole family will benefit.
The hospital is one of 45
Centers of Excellence statewide, each of which received $500,000 grants from the state to upgrade efforts to address the opioid epidemic. At Magee-Womens, that money went to upgrading services. Construction of the Parent Participation Unit, to be located in Magee’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, will cost an additional $500,000, and UPMC hasn’t finalized the sources of that funding.
That was one of UPMC’s pitches to Teresa Miller, the state’s new acting secretary of the Department of Human Services, who toured the NICU and then met with hospital officials.
“We had, what, 4,600 Pennsylvanians die last year” from drug overdoses, Ms. Miller said. “Even scarier is how quickly those numbers are rising.”
After meeting with mothers trying to overcome opioid addiction and cuddling a tiny baby who had been in the hospital for 26 days, Ms. Miller said funding “is obviously a really important part of enabling them to continue to do this excellent work.” She made no promises, though, of additional funds.
In 2000, little more than 1 in 1,000 babies nationwide were born with neonatal abstinence syndrome — the medical term for the symptoms that occur when a baby leaves a mother who had been using opioids, said Michael England, director of Magee’s Pregnancy Recovery Center.
Now roughly 7 percent of Magee’s 10,000 annual babies experiencethe syndrome.
A corps of volunteer “cuddlers” helps to calm the babies, and that can reduce or eliminate the need for morphine. The mom’s involvement, though, would be even better, said Jennifer Kloesz, the medical director of the NICU.
“We’re hoping they spend the whole time with their babies,” Dr. Kloesz said. It may cost more per day, but the babies might be discharged sooner, and the moms will be “comfortable with bringing their baby home.”