Donor Breastmilk

[Batkin]

Do you ever draw feeding syringes for multiple children from a single bottle of donated breast milk or are all donated bottles assigned to one specific child?

If they are assigned, are the bottles received for a specific child (assigned at reception/prior to reception) or are they received into a general pool of milk and then assigned to a child at a later time?

Are there ever situations in which a child is not allowed to receive donor milk?

How common is the use of donated breast milk?

[panwaranjika]

in our setup there are strong cultural influences regarding donor milk . generally parents are not too keen . mothers are easily available in most cases . in the rest we have to give top milk .

[Stefan Johansson]

We have a "milk bank" of donated breast milk, where lactating mothers can donate breast milk. The honorarium for these donations is quite small but enough mothers do it for the good sake. I think most have past experience of neonatal care and want to contribute when they have other (well and term) children.

As far as I know, donor milk can be used for several infants, but the batch id's are recorded.

Parents need to give consent whether their infant can get donor milk.

In our units we almost always use donor milk until the mother herself produce enough milk to feed her infant. All mothers are instructed to start pumping and typically are able to fully feed their infants after a week.

[Guest kalamazoo]

Our facility is a collection center for the human milk bank in a neighboring city. The milk is collected then when sent to the milk bank it is recorded there as to who the donor is by a special assigned number. Donors must be screened with blood testing first for HIV and other blood borne pathogens. The milk is pooled and placed together in pasteurizers. Some milk is designated as preterm and others have varying caloric density and is noted on the bottles as such. When infants receive the milk, the lot number is recorded. Multiple infants can receive milk from multiple lot numbers. We don't use one bottle for one infant unless he happens to need the entire bottle. Our parents receive education from the physician about the benefits of the milk and obtain written consent for it to be given. When an infant is 32 weeks gestation or greater they do not get the donor milk unless specifically ordered by the physician for a specific reason. We do this because of the shortage of the donor EBM and the smallest and most frail receive the donor milk first. I hope this answers your questions. We have seen a huge decrease in the number of GI problems in our population since starting the donor milk program in our NICU.