Sunday, June 22, 2008 Bennett: Julia Singwey, head nurse By Nonnette Bennett Stories
IF BAGUIO General Hospital and Medical Center director Manuel Factora found out that Julia Singwey allowed me to visit her Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) without his permission, he would go ballistic. I know that Dr. Esperanza Bolislis, whose permission I sought, was ballistic when I showed her the list of information that I needed from the NICU. Thank goodness there are gracious and heartwarming OICs like Dr. Jimmy Cabfit, who should show public doctors how to comfort and heal and not just throw their weight around.
But let me tell you about Julia and her pride in her work.
Julia let me into her happy unit as she explained how the NICU is usually filled with sick newborns each March or April of the year and again sometime in September or October. She jokes that it must be the cold and rainy months that inspire baby booming because the room is or rooms are filled to the hilt.
In a spare hospital robe, she toured me at the facility's breast milk bank, a freezer that had a few containers of bright yellow colored frozen liquid. She said, "Look at how rich the colostrum we have for our babies is. But we have more withdrawals than deposits." She pointed to the stacks of containers that numbered only about 30 or so. She said the freezer is usually full so that the babies could have milk while their mothers waited for their breast milk to flow. She said mothers with a lot of milk generously gave the other mothers their milk, if they did not have any.
Julia explained that there were ways to encourage mothers with no or low milk production to pump their milk. Even mothers with inverted nipples could be shown how they could pump their milk out for their babies to have in feeding bottles. Other mothers even request some mothers to directly breast-feed their babies from their own nipples. She said the mothers themselves sought other mothers. Those who refused were allowed to make their own decisions but definitely, Julia does not allow her newborns to be fed formula milk. She said the incidence of newborn deaths is almost nil because the babies are fed mother's milk.
Julia said the babies who weighed less than one kilo were the most fragile babies in the unit. She prided in the hospital practice that the mothers of the babies who were in the unit were there to help feed and tend to the babies. This reduced the demand on manpower at the unit while also ensuring that the babies' needs for medicine and other things are immediately attended to by the mothers.
Julia exudes the confidence that many mothers may not have when dealing with sick newborns. But after understanding how the unit is run, and the shared responsibility between the nurses and the mothers, there is no wonder why her work is admirable. They have lost very few babies just because they know that mother's milk is the best for newborns and that a mother's care is not equaled.
