October 9, 2008
A lactation station celebration — on Oct. 13
There will be an open house from 2 to 3:30 p.m. Monday, Oct. 13, to celebrate the debut of a new lactation station in 240 Schmitz. The station is open to all faculty, staff and student breastfeeding mothers.
The lactation station — a former storage room — will contain a comfortable chair and ottoman, a lamp and a bulletin board on which moms can tack up pictures of their babies. But the central feature of the station is, of course, an electric breast pump that allows a nursing mother to express her milk into bottles in 15 to 20 minutes. And although a number of women will be using the same pump, there is no chance of the milk getting mixed together because each woman buys a kit that contains attachments for her own use.
The new lactation station brings the total available around the University to eight. Others are located at Harborview Medical Center, the UW Medical Center, the Health Sciences Center, Hall Health, Sieg Hall, the Roosevelt Clinic and UW Tower. Some of these are restricted to the occupants of the building. Click here for details.
“We’re really excited to get this lactation station open, because we’ve been without one on West Campus since the Brooklyn Building closed,” said Randi Shapiro, assistant director of Benefits and WorkLife, which oversees the stations. “We need to have them in a variety of locations so that nursing mothers needn’t take too much time from work to do this.”
The new facility is the result of collaboration among the Registrar’s Office, the Student Parent Resource Center, Student Life’s Business Services, Housing and Food Services and Human Resources WorkLife.
A woman wanting to use the site must first go through an orientation to the equipment and use of the room that will be offered by Diana Herrmann (206-543-1041, stuparrc@u.washington.edu), the student parent resource coordinator in Student Financial Aid/Childcare. After the orientation, the woman will be issued a key to the space. Those issued keys should sign up for a time to use the space, which is free.
“The UW is doing this because research shows that breast-fed babies are healthier, and if babies are healthier, moms are healthier too,” Shapiro said. “Having a lactation station helps moms return to work and school with one less hurdle to overcome.”
She said the medical center has had a lactation station for a long time because it started in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, and that other areas of the University have had theirs for at least 15 years. In 2006, the University was named Outstanding Employer by the Breastfeeding Coalition of Washington State.
New mom Alecia Spooner, a doctoral student in Earth and Space Sciences, appreciated the lactation stations when she returned to classes and her work as a TA four months after her son’s birth in October, 2007. She wrote, “Thank you for organizing this service [lactation room]. It made coming back to school/work as a new mom so much easier!! …. I’d also like to say that my favorite part of the lactation room was seeing pictures of other babies on the bulletin board, it reminded me that other moms at the University were facing the same challenges. Though I never met any of the other women using the lounge, I felt good knowing they were out there as new moms too!”
