Breastmilk Errors

Thankyou for all your input. Well I am definately learning from all this in the most horrible painful way imaginable. We are always taught about the benefits of breast-milk but never the risks if such an error occured.

I have no other information. Sorry!

...the nurses were counseled and written up for one of them as the mom was a methadone mom and Hep C positive..

I'm a little disappointed to hear that the same error was made by multiple nurses but one was more harshly dealt with, simply because she was the unlucky one to have made the mistake with the wrong breastmilk. But I guess that's just the way it is.

It is a body fluid and is treated as such. As a parent, if I found out my child was fed another's EBM and that it was from a high risk mom,

someone's head would roll.

We had a nurse who floated to NBN take the wrong baby out to a mom, and she breastfed the baby before the mistake was discovered.

Having had 4 babies, I still wonder how mom didn't know she was nursing the wrong baby. She must have been really tired or doped up on some heavy duty drugs!

We give donor milk to babies all the time. It is treated before we give it and it labeled to be scanned as donor milk.Mom's milk is labeled and scanned as that Mother's milk.

I have heard of this happening in daycare situations also.

Yes it happened in a day care centre and also some hospital in Australia where the wrong baby was handed over to the wrong mother to breastfeed.

Thankyou for all your input. Well I am definately learning from all this in the most horrible painful way imaginable. We are always taught about the benefits of breast-milk but never the risks if such an error occured.

You really should be taught about the risks, maybe that will drive home the point about the importance of checking. A project for your clinical educator perhaps?

I was a breastmilk donor, over 8000 ounces to two milkbanks and two Mom-to-Mom donor relationships. Tested every 6 months while being a donor. It is extrememly rare for a mom to have a disease that can be transmitted via breastmilk.

Oh god, may I ask what caused you to make that mistake? My confusion was caught by another nurse because the baby in question required medications to be added to the milk. I instantly threw the milk away. What didnt help really was that i had another baby on ebm milk with meds to be added, who had 2 names in use. Parents had obviously changed her name at some point and so names were starting to merge together.

I know i should check hospital numbers not just check the name only. Anyway i can confirm that neither babies had any wrong milk because i threw everything away. Anyway the parents must have found out and have gone mad having blood tests done on the baby. I feel awful.

I have never made a near miss before and ive been in my job for quite a few months now.

So did you not face any sort of punishment or disciplinary action for that mistake? Did anyone senior question you or ask you to write a statement of facts.

Exactly how harmful could giving another child the wrong milk be out of curiosity? I realise that i need to view breast-milk in a different way as a body fluid rather than a bottle of milk. :/

At our facility, the breast milk must be either double checked by another nurse and the verification goes into the EMR or scanned into the MAR. Mothers are the only ones allowed to place the "milk labels" with the bar code on the bottles.

Hi There,

Just to update you, we have now implemented changes to the checking and verification of breast-milk. Two RNs must check the milk, check patient numbers etc. All bottles and syringes must be properly labelled.

We don't have a barcoding system but I think with correct observation and a 2 checker system there should be no errors