I want to be a matirnity nurse and I was wondering..

Fiona59 · Dec 29, 2009

Well, it's maternity/post partum nursing.

With the way hospitals are going, they are an endangered species. My hospital doesn't even have a nursery as you are thinking. The babies are weighed in L&D, (my province doesn't footprint), ID attached, swaddled and sent to post partum. The nurse assigned to Mum, washes, diapers and gowns all in the presence of Mum. A complete physical assessment of Mum and babe is done on a set schedule. Then the care is up to Mum. The nurses are there to assist with feeding, lots of education and then the paperwork. Then they go home.

The average stay is less than 24 hours. You have upto five Mums and five babes. It's time consuming and the paperwork intense.

meg567 · Dec 29, 2009

thanks for clearing itup to me : ) what's the professional name of the nurse that is assigned to the mom and the baby?

Chazd18RN · Dec 29, 2009

I agree with the previous poster, many hospitals do not have a traditional well baby newborn nursery anymore. At our hospital the NICU nurses "transition" the babies (or the labor and devlivery nurses do it if a NICU nurse is not available if we are really busy with a lot of deliveries that night). They are there are at the delivery just in case there are any problems. They do the inital assessments and vital signs, give the first bath, first injections, take pictures, etc. All of this is done at the mothers bedside unless the mother had a c-section. In that case, the initial newborn orders would be done in the "transition" nursery. After the mom is recovered from a lady partsl delivery (2 hrs) or c-section (1-2 hrs), the mom and baby are admitted to the mother/baby post partum floor. The mother baby nurse takes care of both the mom and baby in the same room because we do whats called "couplet" care. They are then both discharged in 24-72 hours. The nursing interventions that you mentioned in your post sound like a combination of NICU nurse responsibilites and mother baby responsibilities at my facility. Every facility is different though, so just check around before you make a decision. Even if you do find a hospital that has a traditional well baby newborn nursery, you may want to rethink that option because it may limit your experience if you want to ever go to another hopsital.

meg567 · Dec 31, 2009

thanks so much for all the info : ) so it's called a baby/mom nurse or is there any other professional name for it?

Blackheartednurse · Dec 31, 2009

what exactly do they do.. I'm only in high school but I really want to go into nursing and work with newborns. I don't want to work in the NICU, I just want to work with the healthy new born babies. The nurse that weighs,measures them, takes their foot prints, gets them dressed, and basically takes care of the baby until it leaves from the hospital . I have came upon many sites and most of them all have different things and I was wondering what exactly does a matirnity nurse do?

Healthy newborns.... :uhoh3: You do realize that nurses take care of the sick... :uhoh3:

shrimpchips, LPN · Dec 31, 2009

thanks for clearing itup to me : ) what's the professional name of the nurse that is assigned to the mom and the baby?

maternity/postpartum nurse...if you work in labor & delivery (L&D), that would make you a labor & delivery nurse. I'm a nursing student but I've already had by OB rotation in both maternity/PP and L&D so I can offer some insight. The hospital where I did my rotation at had a traditional well-baby maternity/PP unit along with a special care nursery which is basically like a step below the NICU...they have a children's hospital branch with a NICU so babies that need to be sent to the NICU automatically get sent there...but if the special care nursery can handle the case, they'll stay there. I went to the special care nursery. There were a lot of premature infants, a lot of them in respiratory distress. There was also a drug withdrawal baby, which was a sad case.

The hospital also had it's own L&D unit. We would spend a few weeks on maternity/PP and then transition over to L&D. PP is a lot of teaching - you have a lot of new moms coming in that need to be taught how to care for her baby (how to feed, when to feed, how to change diapers, etc etc etc) as well as how to care for herself. The patient load depends on the size of the unit, but the average the nurses had on my floor is about 4 - so technically 8, because you are responsible for both mom AND baby. If you have twins or triplets or more, you're responsible for all of those babies.

We assessed 3 times each shift - at 8am, 12pm and 4pm - on both mom AND baby. that includes vital signs. doing all of those assessments can be tedious after awhile lol. There is a lot of charting on PP. Medications were mostly on a PRN (as needed/as necessary) basis. Expect to do a lot of teaching with new moms but you will also get moms having their 2nd child or something, so usually those patients don't have a lot of teaching needs but you always need to make sure! We were responsible for making sure the baby got fed and also reminding mom to feed her baby. As for baby medications, Hepatitis B is pretty much routine on PP.

PP was a good experience - some days it was busy, and other days it wasn't. On the less-busy days, after everything was done, I would hang out in the nursery taking care of the babies by feeding them/changing them and cradling them :)