Question

Compose an argument proposing that the risk of newborn falls outweighs the benefits of rooming-in after birth.

Please cite at least one source to support your argument.

Answer 1

Hospital efforts to support breastfeeding by having babies “room-in” with mothers may have a rare unintended consequence: an increased risk of newborn falls.

Neonatal falls are increasingly recognized as a postpartum safety risk, with as many as 1,600 newborn falls occurring in U.S. hospitals each year, researchers note in Pediatrics. While this represents a miniscule fraction of all births, doctors are increasingly concerned that at least some of these falls may be resulting from new mothers falling asleep while breastfeeding babies in their hospital beds.

To assess the potential for breastfeeding programs to influence the risk of newborn falls, researchers looked at three cases that happened after one hospital initiated several changes designed to support breastfeeding and mother-baby bonding.

To encourage successful breastfeeding, it is important to keep mothers and babies together in one room, as much as possible.

This practice is somewhat different from earlier decades when babies spent a significant part of the postpartum hospitalization in the nursery, away from their mother,“Though this separation was likely a barrier to successful breastfeeding, it may have provided additional opportunities for mothers to rest and recover.”

Three falls occurred within one year of starting a range of breastfeeding supports the hospital needed to implement in order to be designated as a “baby friendly hospital.” Qualifying as Baby-Friendly, under the joint WHO and UNICEF program that created the designation, requires policies that include educating families to make informed decisions about infant feeding, encouraging mothers to hold babies skin-to-skin right after birth, allowing rooming-in and offering lactation support.

We found that as we improved our ability to support mothers with successful breastfeeding there was a surge in newborn falls,“This suggests that we may be adding to the burden of maternal fatigue, and increasing the risk of newborn falls.”

Not all of the falls exclusively involved breastfeeding, however. Maternal exhaustion did appear to play a role in all three cases.

In one instance, a mother fell asleep while breastfeeding and woke up to discover the baby crying on the hospital floor. The infant had a skull fracture but was sent home that evening, only to arrive at the emergency room at age 7 weeks with seizures.