When mom’s milk isn’t available, Overlake Medical Center’s Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) uses donated human milk to help critically-ill premature babies.
We’d like you to know about the journey that donor milk makes before it can be given to our fragile preemies.
The Overlake NICU uses donor milk from Northwest Mothers Milk Bank (NWMMB) in Portland, OR. NWMMB partners with the Human Milk Banking Association of North America (HMBANA), which follows strict guidelines established by the FDA and CDC for processing donor milk. Overlake is also a depot for moms to drop off donations if they qualify.
First, potential donors have a phone screen with staff at the milk bank to share a brief health history and determine if any factors might prevent donation, such as a recent blood transfusion or taking certain medications or supplements.
If approved to move forward, moms have blood work done similar to what’s done for donating blood. Moms pack up their frozen surplus breast milk and drop it off at a depot such as Overlake .
The depot freezes and then ships the milk to the nearest milk bank (Portland, in our case), where it is stored until results from mom’s lab work confirm her milk is safe to use.
Milk banks then pasteurize all donated milk. Donations are pooled from several donors to make a batch big enough to process. Bacterial cultures are taken from random samples after pasteurization to assure no contamination occurred in processing.
After that, the donor milk is refrozen in small bottles appropriate for feeding volumes of preemies. When hospitals like us request the milk, it is shipped frozen on dry ice from the bank to us for feeding our fragile NICU babies.
Donors are not paid for their milk donations through HMBANA. But because supplies of donor human milk are in such demand, HMBANA pays for all donor blood work and any shipping costs to get milk to the bank. HMBANA then charges hospitals $4-6 per ounce to cover processing costs.
Thanks to donors everywhere for making this generous gift available for feeding fragile babies who don’t have mother’s milk!