The donations of 292 women make it possible to provide this food to promote the development of newborns who cannot receive it from their mothers.
The breast milk bank in the Region of Murcia, which was launched in April 2021 at the Virgen de la Arrixaca hospital, has already allowed 235 newborns to be fed who could not receive this food from their mothers. From that date to the present, according to the indicators corresponding to the activity of the milk bank, 292 women participated as donors whose donations made it possible to receive 1,500 liters of pasteurized milk from which 235 newborns admitted to the Virgen de la Arrixaca and Santa Lucia. Likewise, the Rafael Méndez de Lorca hospital recently received donated milk to dispense newborns admitted to this center.
Breast milk is the best food for infants to promote their development. In the case of neonates with some pathology, such as premature babies weighing less than 1,500 grams, its benefits include the prevention and reduction of necrotizing enterocolitis, a complication that premature babies can suffer and that affects the intestine.
In the milk bank, this food is processed, analyzed, stored and distributed to nourish hospitalized newborns who, for different reasons, do not have enough milk from their mother and are especially vulnerable, such as those who are born with low weight.
At present there are 15 banks throughout Spain and the one in the Region is number 16. This initiative represents another step in the strategic line of the Ministry of Health to promote and support breastfeeding. The women who want to participate are selected after a clinical interview and an analysis (serological and toxic) and, if everything is correct, they are accepted as donors.
The participants express their milk at home and freeze it. A transport company collects the milk from the donors’ homes anywhere in the Region and transfers it to the Arrixaca milk bank, where it is analyzed to determine its nutritional properties and cultured.
Regional Milk Bank Award
The regional milk bank won the prize for the best poster communication at the Congress of the Spanish Association of Human Milk Banks, a national meeting held in Santiago de Compostela, which was attended by the 16 existing banks in Spain and brought together neonatologists, midwives , nurses and laboratory technicians.
The work, entitled ‘Retrospective analysis of microbiological controls carried out on raw milk at the Bank of the Region of Murcia’, won the prize for the originality of the study and methodological quality. Knowledge of the microbiological results will help improve the donation process in the Region and can serve as an example for other centers, since it provides corrective measures to donors in the extraction, storage and collection at home. For this reason, it reduces the rejection rates of raw milk according to the stipulated quality criteria.
The closest banks are located in Granada and Valencia. The project includes the incorporation of the Rafael Méndez de Lorca hospital as a new donor care center and delivery of pasteurized donated milk to its Neonatal Hospitalization Unit.
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