| A Devastating Weekend for many in North Carolina |
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We hope all of our partners in the PQCNC initiatives weathered the storms over the weekend and we extend our support to anyone sorting through destruction in the aftermath.
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Article provided by Polly Sisk, PhD
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 Mothers have always relied upon and benefited from the experience of other mothers. It has only been in recent history that mothers have depended upon the medical profession for advice regarding breastfeeding. A recent paper from Rossman and colleagues illustrates the mother-to-mother support provided by peer counselors to mothers of very low birth weight infants. Mothers report that the value of peer counselors is in their shared experience with the difficulty of establishing and maintaining an adequate milk supply and breastfeeding while dealing with the emotional stress of having an infant in the NICU. Introducing peer counselors into the NICU environment is an enormous challenge in an era of cost cutting; however this paper provides such compelling evidence of the benefit we need to consider it... Click here to read more.
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| "Making Meaning" of your Data |
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 All of you have received a report of data you entered into the web data base and many of you have contacted Keith about it. The data is meant to support you in achieving the results you desire for mothers and VLBW infants admitted to your NCCC. Incomplete or missing data handicaps your ability to make meaning of the work you have been doing. When the data are complete and represent aspects of the care delivered, the home team can begin to examine the data for information to use going forward. As an example, with complete data you can understand the potential for mothers to be told about the importance of providing milk by MD's and/or NNP's at the time of delivery for your unit. Individual clinicians can only guess about the reliability of their own practice and would have no way of knowing for the group without data. With complete data, nurses can examine the potential for the mom's who have VLBW infants to be asked every day about pumping. Both of these interventions have been shown to increase the number of mother's who pump and provide milk for their infants. We are eager to know how teams will continue to collect and enter the data as we go forward as well as how you are evaluating the data reports which have been forwarded.
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| Learning Session Dates for your Calendars |
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 May 19: The second in-person learning session for this initiative will be held in Raleigh on May 19th. Please have one member of your team click here to pre-register the members of your team who will attend the learning session.
Action Request: Each team is requested to forward a description or copy of a tool, poster, fact sheet, brochure, sticker or other item developed to help your team increase the number of mothers that provide milk for their VLBW babies for the first 28 days. Please email to Karen (metzguer@med.unc.edu) by May 6 2011. These "tricks of the trade" will be shared in the handouts for our learning session on May 19.
June 13: Please mark your calendars and have as many of your team participate as possible in our final meeting by webinar from 2-4 pm. Connection information will be shared in future email.
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| Contact |
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 Karen Metzguer
PQCNC Improvement Advisor
metzguer@med.unc.edu
Work: 919-966-8391
Mobile: 919-619-6332
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