Canada: Nursery for ‘healthy babies’ closes

From cbcnews.ca: No more nursery for healthy newborns at Charlottetown hospital

Charlottetown’s Queen Elizabeth Hospital is doing away with its nursery for healthy babies.

Starting Monday, these newborns will be cared for in their mothers’ rooms. One nurse will be assigned to care for both the mother and the baby.

The new program is designed to build parental confidence and to protect the baby from infection, because it reduces the number of people an infant comes in contact with.

Premature babies and others requiring extra care can still be placed in the intermediate nursery or the neonatal intensive care unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.

A similar mother-baby model of care has been running for several years at the Prince County Hospital in Summerside.

September 29, 2008 | Filed Under Hospitals | 1 Comment 

Off Topic…

Some of you may have followed the links on the site to my practice website and learned that my husband was a member of the 1996 US Olympic Gymnastics Team. In our “spare” time (hahahaha!) we keep with what is going on in the sport and I support his efforts to provide behind the scenes access for the fans through his website, GymnastTV.com. Last weekend we interviewed almost all of the athletes participating in the 2008 Tour of Gymnastics Superstars. Visit Mihai’s website, subscribe to GymnastTV on iTunes and YouTube!

Of course participating on his blog and Podcast has fired me up– I will be getting to work on a fresh one of my own soon!

September 25, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging | Leave a Comment 

CALIFORNIA: Blogger returns ;)

I’ve had a couple of emails– thank you! — asking where I disappeared to and the answer is I’m swamped!  Home birth in The OC is thriving!  When I’m not up all night at births, I’m doing my best to catch up on sleep and visit with the rest of my clients who are in need of their prenatal and postpartum care.  Oh and I have those four kids of my own who just started school this week and of course one helpful husband!  I’m also in school taking a review biology course that didn’t transfer to the regionally accredited college level from my nationally accredited midwifery school.  I enjoy the once-a-week class with 300 of my closest friends in a classroom that looks more like a small arena.  There are a lot of familiar students from my previous classes in it, so it’s a fun social hour to boot.

Another reader asked if I was going to do any more Podcasts and the truth is, I’d love to but there are not enough hours in the day to get it done and for my husband to do the editing.  If I do another one all of you will be the first to know about it!

My website statistics indicate many of you are burning up the search engines looking for feedback on Dr. Phil’s home birth show.  I understand it has already been filmed and we’re waiting on the airdate.

The next most popular search is that of the of the two women in Florida who were retried for the death of Mara McGlade at her birth at home.  Friday Linda and Tanya McGlade (Mara’s mother- and sister-in-law respectively)  were found guilty a second time in their retrial for the practice of and attempted practice of unlicensed midwifery and face up to five years in prison.  You can read various reports here:  Yahoo search results.

As you might imagine from the messages I post on behalf of the Big Push for Midwives campaign that I am in favor of licensing Certified Professional Midwives.  It’s a tragedy that Mara McGlade’s midwives (yes, they were midwives) were not educated on the basics of life-saving measures when it came to blood loss.  It is certainly possible to pray for God’s assistance AND provide hemostatic medications at the same time!

September 6, 2008 | Filed Under Blogging, In the News | Leave a Comment