Social and Celebrations

A huge piece of our peer support program, the weekly Mom to Mom lunch, re-started this month at Sunnybrook! This group event is key to delivering peer and lactation support, connecting current NICU families with each other, and providing nutrition and a break to the moms (aunties, sisters, grandmas) who attend.

To get to this point we needed to return to normal on a few other fronts (e.g. returning to the minimal visitor restrictions we had pre-pandemic, Cuddler Program returning to being our standard of care, Milk and Cookies education sessions running successfully). We also needed to sort out logistics for paying for food, as our hospital accounting operations changed during the pandemic.

I'm thrilled to say parents are engaged and participating in these lunches! I'm also so proud to acknowledge the re-start of this program was led by our Breastfeeding Resource Nurse along with our NICU Peer Counsellor (graduat…

I am so happy to be able to say that at Sunnybrook, we have returned to the family and visitor presence policy we had prior to COVID-19.

During the pandemic new restrictions of various kinds were put in place. We are now back to:

• parents (or a baby's two family caregivers) decide who may visit their baby (no limit on number of visitors except for medical reasons - this aspect restored this month)

• children under the age of 5 may be in the NICU baby's room (restored this month)

• parent's NICU fobs open the doors to the NICU and to their baby's room (for a long time this was deactivated so they had to buzz in and be screened for COVID before they could enter the NICU).

Excluding young children and limiting the number of family and visitors who could be present at one time caused very difficult separation and…