is this normal newborn care? advice please

[wobble]

for the past two years i have worked in a small community hospital in the birth center. we deal with low-risk cases and average 20-40 deliveries a month. the management have recently hired a neonatal co-ordinator to primarily update our skills with sick babies who need transferred to NICU's in larger hospitals. this is great but this lady is now changing our normal newborn polices so that EVERY newborn regardless of apgars and absence of predisposing factors gets a rectal temp and a blood sugar as part of our routine care. the staff here are not NICU trained so we may be in the dark ages as to new standards/ research etc, but we feel this is a little over the top for a birth center that deals with "normal "babies. We would be very grateful for any opinions or advice anyone has about this matter and if anyone could suggest research for or against then we would welcome it. A big thank-you to all who help:)

[rnpilot]

Well, as memory serves me from floating to NBN regularly years back, all admits got a rectal temp. to check patency (unless stool passed) and we had a criteria for checking glucose depending on weight and maternal factors. We generally got a bottle in the kid's mouth ASAP if it wasn't a breast baby to prevent glucose even beoming an issue (policy was within 1-2 hours as I recal). There's nothing wrong with being conservative, but getting a glucose level on a healthy newborn without risk factors is unneccessary, IMHO.

[sparkyRN]

It's probably a good idea to do a rectal once upon admission to make sure that the rectum is patent (r/o imperforate orifice

Our Level III NICU stopped doing rectal temps on admission several years ago for this very reason. We do a visual inspection on admission for patency, but no rectal temps, ax temps only. You don't want to perforate an imperforate orifice with a thermometer...OUCH