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One of the first things mothers who've just given birth must do is breastfeed. The nurses in the pediatric wards - especially at KHMH - advocate that breast is best. But for a while, lactating mothers would have little privacy since they had to breastfeed right in their hospital bed in the maternity ward. But today, KHMH unveiled its brand new lactation lounge, which was donated by the Rotary Club of Belize Sunrise.
Today we spoke with the president of the club and the CEO of the hospital about this new space for mothers - just ahead of Mother's Day.
Misty Michael, President, Rotary Club Of Belize Sunrise
"One of the fellow Rotarians, Dr Selma Bermudez is actually an epidemiologist here at the hospital. She was aware of the situation with the room at the time and that the hospital was in need of assistance in renovating it. She brought the project to the club, our service projects committee evaluated the potential project. One of the areas for Rotary is maternal and child health so we saw it fitting that it was a project that our club should partner up."
Chandra Cansino, CEO, KHMH
"The KHMH, I think we were the first officially appointed baby-friendly hospital which we started to prepare for in 2006 and officially got our appointment in 2008. Since then, we have been evaluated externally every two years to ensure that we're meeting the international standards. One of those is to have a lactation area, we did have one before but it was not as nice as this so we are extremely grateful, this is very comfortable, and it will facilitate both patients and staff if they need to either extract milk or breastfeed."
Gaylene Tesucum, Marketing Manager, Unicomer Belize Limited
"We have recliners, we want mom to be very comfortable and this is the ideal time, it's mother's day so I am so happy that this is launched during Mother's Day, we have recliners - our new moms just went through a whole lot. They went through 9 months and their bodies have gone through a lot, we want them to be comfortable so we have some comfortable seating arrangements with the recliners, we also have a fridge that we donated as well. We want to keep the breastmilk cool because they will have more breastmilk and then we have baby gear and I think that's a thing that not a lot of people know but courts also provides baby gear."
