Feeding and nutrition on the Special Care Baby Unit

Wye Valley NHS Trust was recognised by UNICEF in 2019 for work with mothers and newborn babies and awarded Baby Friendly Status. 

If your baby is admitted to the special care baby unit, you may feel a little overwhelmed at all the information that you receive with regard to feeding your baby. The staff on the special care baby unit will support you to establish your chosen method of feeding once your baby is able to start enteral feeding.

Initially, your baby may require intravenous fluids until we are able to start giving them some milk feeds. If your baby has been born pre-term or is unwell, initially this will be started slowly and given via a feeding tube passed down the nostril.  The volume will slowly be increased as your baby tolerates the milk and as they grow.

You may be asked if you are able to hand express some breast milk, and you will be supported by staff both on SCBU and Maternity Ward to achieve this. Initially you will only get small amounts of colostrum 'golden drops', but as you continue to express your milk supply will increase and you can then use a breast pump to express your milk.

We encourage skin to skin (kangaroo care) to help stimulate your milk production and we also use knitted bonding squares to help you feel close to your baby and to help stimulate milk production.

We have breast pumps available to use on the unit at the cot side and we have small portable breast pumps that you can loan once you have been discharged home and your baby is still on the unit.

We have safe milk storage boxes which you can store your fresh breast milk in the refrigerator for up to 48 hours.  You will be provided with labels to put on the milk which will have your babies name and date of birth on, you will need to label it with the date and time of expression.

After 48 hours your fresh expressed breast milk will need to be frozen, we have a small freezer on the unit where we can store small amounts of frozen expressed breast milk, but we may ask you at times to freeze your milk at home.  Your milk can be frozen for up to 3 months if stored on the unit and 6 months if stored at home. Find out more about feeding and nutrition on SCBU.

We do encourage non-nutritive sucking and staff will provide you with an information leaflet on this so that you can make an informed choice. We never offer the use of a soother to encourage sucking without consent from the baby's parents first.

During the first few days there will be a lot of information to take in, but as you settle in to your new daily routine you may want to learn to feed your baby via their nasogastric tube, and staff will support you to successfully feel confident to do this.

At 34 weeks corrected gestation your baby will start to develop the 'suck, swallow, breath reflex' and this is when we will be there to support you and your baby to establish suck feeding either by breast or bottle, as they start to show feeding cues.

If you have chosen to bottle feed your baby, we will ask you to bring in your own bottles to the unit, so that your baby is able to get used to these prior to discharge. Sterilising equipment and formula feed is available on the unit.