Maternal Infant Health

Maternal Infant Health at Einstein Medical Center Philadelphia includes three units – Labor & Delivery, the Perinatal Newborn Unit and a Level III Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU).

We are a Magnet®-designated facility with a strong shared governance structure and a culture that promotes interdisciplinary teamwork toward the best possible patient outcomes, professional development and autonomy for our nurses, and innovation. Our Shared Governance structure ensures our nurses are able to adopt and manage new technologies and techniques effectively for the best possible care of our patients.

As a Baby-Friendly birth facility, we promote skin-to-to skin contact between mother and baby after delivery and throughout their hospital stay, rooming-in - which keeps mothers and babies together to promote bonding and breastfeeding, and breastfeeding support by our trained nursing staff. Many of our nurses become International Board-Certified Lactation Consultants (IBCLCs), supported by our department.

We also have among the lowest infant and maternal mortality rates in the nation.

Best Outcomes

Our nurse-physician dyad works together to provide mothers, babies and families with the best possible labor and delivery and postpartum/perinatal care and outcomes.

Our units are housed within our own building on the Einstein Philadelphia campus - the Lifter Building - which features two of our own operating rooms, so patients needing Cesarean delivery do not have to go to the hospital's main operating rooms. We have a six-bed triage for Labor & Delivery, 10 laboring beds and all private rooms in the Perinatal Newborn Unit, which promote more effective bonding for parents and babies and offer a more comfortable and supportive setting for examinations and breastfeeding. We have patient care associates on staff within Labor & Delivery and the PNU to assist nurses with patient care.

Within Maternal Infant Health, we reimburse all nurses who achieve certification in their specialties and provide an annual incentive bonus to nurses with those certifications. We provide Neonatal Resuscitation Certification to our NICU nurses on site. Our NICU offers many family support programs - including parent CPR training, our Tiny Bookworms program and cameras that allow parents to see their newborn if they can't be in the NICU - and our NICU nurses play a critical role in these programs.

Rounding

Regular multidisciplinary rounding is an integral part of Maternal Infant Health, and our nurse-physician dyad offers Video Fridays during which new and expectant mothers can call in and ask questions about labor and delivery, the postpartum period and the hospital and receive expert answers from our nurses and physicians.

All of our new nurses go into our Nurse Residency Program, and we pair them with physician residents for an evidence-based service line project. These collaborations have been very helpful to our nurse and physician residents and have helped us implement important evidence-based solutions into our practice, like a special drape that measures blood loss from mothers after they have given birth. Our nurses are frequently engaged in EBP projects and research, presenting about half the posters on the hospital's annual Research Day. We also have our own nurse-educator on site to support nurses in the Maternal Infant Health specialty.