Infant Nutrition Room at Virtua Voorhees NICU

Delivering the best nutrition for every baby is vitally important. Breast milk provides many health benefits for newborns, especially for those who are low birth weight or premature.

At Virtua Health, we work hard to support each baby’s nutritional needs. Preparing and administering breastmilk for babies in our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) can be complex and time-consuming because the milk needs fortification with additional nutrients. Nurses prepare each feed to exact specifications, sometimes spending up to two hours per shift on this task. We plan to build a centralized infant nutrition room staffed by dedicated milk technicians using the latest barcoding technology. This will greatly enhance our care team’s ability to deliver the best nutrition to every baby.

Building a New Space with the Latest Technology

Our goal is to create a centralized infant nutrition room to provide a safe, separate environment for milk storage, processing and preparation. Specially trained milk technicians will manage and prepare the milk. Using barcode technology, nurses will scan the milk as an added safety check while preparing the milk and before providing it to the babies in their care. The new room will be adjacent to the NICU at Virtua Voorhees Hospital.

Features:

• An anteroom, a preparation room, and cleanup areas
• Two freezers and one large refrigerator with temperature tracking alarms
• An infrared spectrometer to analyze human milk macronutrients
• A Keriton Kare scanning and barcoding system to streamline workflow, ensure quality control, and provide safe milk administration. Keriton Kare will give nurses, doctors and parents the tools they need to optimize every aspect of feeding management.

Our new infant nutrition room and barcoding technology will have tremendous impact — and will help keep our patients healthy in their earliest weeks of life. With the support of specially trained milk technicians, our nurses will be able to spend more time with patients and their families.

Supporting Mothers in Providing Breastmilk

In 2019, Virtua Voorhees Hospital and Virtua Memorial Hospital were designated as Baby Friendly birth facilities by Baby-Friendly USA, Inc. More than 8,000 babies are born at Virtua's hospitals each year. Building an infant nutrition room is an important part of supporting parents and being "baby friendly." For mother's with an infant in the NICU, pumping breast milk allows them to contribute to their baby's care in a very special way.