Insights in Practice Background

When an infant is medically compromised or requires sur-gery shortly after birth, traditional breastfeeding is inter-rupted. Breast milk provides the newborn with superior nutrition and immune properties to support growth and feed-ing tolerance and fight infection.1 In the United States, moth-ers of these medically complex infants often spend many hours using a breast pump to express their breast milk and store it for their baby to receive via a feeding tube or bottle until breastfeeding can be introduced. At Boston Children’s Hospital, we performed an informal telephone inquiry of many pediatric facilities and neonatal intensive care units (NICUs) to determine baseline practices for the preparation of breast milk feedings. It revealed that many hospitals lack appropriate physical space for the prepa-ration of fortified breast milk feedings, and the preparatio