Many New Moms Feel 'Unready' at Hospital Discharge

Better prenatal and in-hospital education would help, researchers say.

By Serena Gordon
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, August 6, 2007; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, Aug. 6 (HealthDay News) -- About one in six new moms may not be ready to fully take care of their newborns at the time they're discharged from U.S. hospitals, new research suggests.

Reporting in the August issue of Pediatrics, researchers found that 17 percent of new mothers and infants were "unready" for the transition at the time of discharge. Eleven percent of mothers felt unready, while 5 percent of pediatricians felt mother-infant pairs were unready. Just 1 percent of obstetricians felt the mother-infant pairs were unready.

"We wanted to address the lack of information regarding the postpartum decision-making process for healthy term newborns and its consequences during the neonatal period, after federal legislation that went in effect in 1998 established a minimum postpartum length of stay of 48 hours after vaginal deliveries and 96 hours after Caesarean deliveries, unless a mother and physician decide otherwise," explained the study's lead author, Dr. Henry Bernstein. He is chief of general academic pediatrics at Children's Hospital at Dartmouth, in Lebanon, N.H.

To do this, Bernstein and his colleagues got more than 450 practitioners from 112 sites around the country to recruit 4,300 mother-infant pairs. Mothers, obstetricians and pediatricians are considered key partners in decisions on when to leave the hospital after delivery.

The researchers found that, at the time of discharge, almost one in six mother-infant pairs was deemed unready. In most cases, it was the mother, rather than her doctors, who felt she and/or her infant was not yet prepared to go home.

The researchers identified eight factors that seemed to correlate with feeling unready, including a maternal history of chronic disease, first-time parenthood, inadequate prenatal care, delivering during non-routine hours, neonatal problems in the hospital, a limited number of in-hospital education classes, plans to breast-feed, and the mother's race -- black women were almost 40 percent more likely to feel unready to be discharged than whites, the study found.