Infants, moms benefit from MUSC's Milk Preparation Room

Receiving news that she will have to give birth to her child prematurely is one of the worst nightmares for any soon-to-be mother. For Anna Johnson, on May 25, that became her reality.

Johnson’s daughter, Adelyn, came into the world at just 33 weeks, seven weeks earlier than a typical arrival date. When Johnson discovered Adelyn weighed only 2 pounds, 10 1/2 ounces — roughly half the average weight for a baby at 33 weeks — she knew her daughter had a long way to go before she would reach a healthy weight.

“They encourage you to breast-feed right away, but as a preemie she really didn’t have those skills yet. She didn’t really know what to do. She was very healthy for being as small as she was, but she still had a lot she had to work on,” Johnson recalled.

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, breast milk protects newborn babies by lowering the risk of several life-threatening illnesses, including lower respiratory tract infections, diarrhea, vomiting and also conditions such as chronic ear infections.

“Breast-feeding was not an option for us immediately, but it was something that I really wanted to do,” Johnson said.

After a pregnancy complicated by preeclampsia, gestational diabetes and intrauterine growth restriction, Johnson found the long road ahead of her and Adelyn daunting. 

That’s when she discovered the many benefits of the newly opened Milk Preparation Room for new mothers in similar situations.

The Milk Preparation Room officially opened May 2 on Level 2 of MUSC’s Children’s Hospital, just in time to help Johnson and Adelyn when they needed it most. Created out of the need for a standardized and consistent process for preparing breast milk, the room is staffed with a dedicated team of milk preparation technicians.

This changed everything for Johnson — she was able to pump her breast milk and then pass it on to the milk preparation technicians to handle the rest of the complicated process required to help her daughter grow to a healthy weight.

“My daughter needed more calories than my milk actually provided. They were able to take it and do what they needed to do to fortify the milk and then give it back to the nurses in order to feed it to her,” said Johnson.

Newborns often have specific nutritional needs that require special recipes for the preparation of their mother’s breast milk: Some babies need hydrolyzing protein fortifiers mixed into their milk, while others just require regular human growth protein. Every baby is different, and the trained milk preparation technicians must follow the strict dietary requirements prescribed by their patients’ doctors.

Kate Juergens, pediatric clinical nutrition manager at MUSC and
coordinator of the Milk Preparation Room, takes this charge very seriously “I make sure that our recipes are correct — that when the doctor orders this specific calorie level, I know exactly how much powder is being added to the milk to make it that many calories,” she said.

The Milk Preparation Room benefits nurses in the Children’s Hospital as well. Nurses are extremely busy, and milk preparation is just one more item on their already long list of responsibilities. According to Juergens, MUSC conducted a time study and found that nurses were spending on average an hour of each shift preparing breast milk for newborns in their care. In addition to being time consuming, milk preparation is often found to be inconsistent among nursing staff and different areas of the hospital.

“The big benefit of having the milk prep room is that it has very strict standards of sanitation, quality and prepping procedures,” said Juergens.

There isn’t any room for error when preparing breast milk for a newborn baby; the specialized milk prep staff ensures that quality and safety are maintained at all times.

“Breast milk is such a beneficial thing for our patients to get, and we all are really proud that we’re helping to make sure that our newborns are getting the right nutrition,” Juergens added.

Another concern that the milk preparation program staff addresses is that many new mothers can’t produce enough breast milk, but they desperately want their babies to receive it so they can reap the numerous health benefits it provides. According to Johnson, the pressure for new mothers to breast-feed can be intense and overwhelming, especially if they don’t have the ability to produce enough milk on their own.

The solution to this problem is the Mother’s Milk Bank of South Carolina, the first human donor milk bank in the state. Since April 2015, the bank has been picking up donor milk from various depot sites across South Carolina, then pasteurizing, thoroughly examining and distributing it to hospitals in need of breast milk.

Donor milk from the Mother’s Milk Bank was prepared for Adelyn by hospital milk preparation technicians until Johnson was able to produce enough breast milk for her baby.

Meaghan Grandbouche, a trained milk preparation technician at MUSC who has a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and dietetics, gets to see firsthand every day how the Milk Preparation Room and the Mother’s Milk Bank together improve patient care at MUSC. “Breast milk is a very important part of an infant’s health, and that’s why it’s amazing that donor milk can be given to babies whose moms, no matter what they do, can’t supply enough breast milk for their babies.”

Grandbouche is optimistic about the future of the Milk Preparation Room at MUSC. A new, spacious room is in the works for the eighth floor of the Shawn Jenkins Children’s Hospital, set to open in 2019.  “I know everyone is really excited for us to expand. I’ve seen the layout for the new children’s hospital, and it will be amazing because we’ll have a lot more space and resources to be able to do what we need to do for our patients.”

Juergens and the rest of the milk preparation team agree, and they are also eager to expand their roles to include preparation of infant formula, tube feeding and supplements, in addition to preparing fortified breast milk.

Johnson credits the encouraging technicians and resources that the Milk Preparation Room offers with helping her and Adelyn get home quickly. “If it had been all up to me to pump, fortify the milk and then feed it to Adelyn, I probably would have quit breast-feeding. There is so much on any new mother’s plate, and then add a preemie to the mix — it would have been impossible.”

Adelyn and her mom are finally home together. “She is gaining weight like crazy and really starting to hit some of her milestones,” said Johnson proudly.

With Adelyn home safe and sound, Johnson will never forget her experience with the Milk Preparation Room at MUSC. “You don’t ever wish this experience on anybody, because it’s really hard. But the people at MUSC were so supportive and so wonderful that if the only reason my daughter had to be born early was to meet these people, it was worth it.”