I just returned from St. Rose De Lima hospital, where I was invited to come do an in-service with the nursing staff to discuss the procedure for handling placentas that mothers want to take home. What a wonderful, positive experience! It was immediately apparent that everyone in the Labor & Delivery and Postpartum departments truly care about their clients and want to accommodate their requests.
St. Rose does have a policy in place whereby they hold every placenta for 7 days. However, upon request by the parents, they will release the placenta to them after that period of time. This policy is in place in case a situation arises where they would need to send the placenta to pathology for some reason. I wanted to talk to the nurses to make sure they understood why a woman may want to take her placenta home, what exactly I do for my clients, and how the placenta is handled after it leaves their hospital. I explained that it was very important to keep the placenta frozen for the duration of the holding period, so that mothers could get the optimum benefits from their placenta capsules.
The end result of the meeting was that I will come up with a special packaging kit for my clients who deliver at De Lima. They can bring in this kit, and the nurses will put the placenta in the special packaging and freeze their placentas for them. This is exactly what I wanted to see happen, so I am just incredibly grateful that the nurses will go above and beyond the typical procedures for my clients.
Special thanks to Lize MacDonald, charge nurse, for allowing me to come in today. I loved hearing her midwifery stories from her days in England and Canada. Thanks also to Rose, charge nurse, for all of her support and help over the last two years in working with client requests, and to Midge Elkins, nurse manager, for allowing special handling of the placentas that will be used for encapsulation purposes.
I’d also like to thank the entire nursing staff for being so wonderfully supportive of the women who prefer natural birth options, and who want to take their placentas home. This is a fantastic benefit to women in the Henderson area.