ORANGE : St. Joseph Delivers Help to New Mothers

When new mothers leave the hospital with their babies, they often arrive home before they remember that there were questions they meant to ask. That, plus typical new-parent anxiety, can result in panicked calls back to the maternity ward.

To help those new mothers, St. Joseph Hospital on Wednesday opened its Mother-Baby Assessment Center, which offers free follow-up visits two to four days after delivery.

Martha Dellamaggiore, 31, of Irvine, who delivered her second daughter Sunday, was the center’s first patient. “To be able to come to a place like this is wonderful,” she said.

With many insurers reducing what they will pay for labor, delivery and follow-up care, mothers and newborns are being discharged from the hospitals much earlier than they were 20 years ago, said Michael Linzey, an obstetrician at St. Joseph.

In the early 1970s, he said, the typical hospital stay was three to five days. Now it is one or two, he said, with some women being released just 12 hours after giving birth.

The trend toward early release has “kind of exceeded what I consider to be safe,” Linzey said. “The insurance companies define what ‘need’ is, and they have really ratcheted down the number of days that they’ll cover.”

That means more new moms leaving the hospital with unanswered questions, medical personnel say, and may result in some problems going undiagnosed. Heart murmurs, jaundice and dehydration in newborns often show up only after several days, they say.

And many mothers give up on breast-feeding after the first week because they run into difficulties that could be resolved with some instruction, said Edith Porter, a registered nurse at St. Joseph.

Porter and registered nurse Cheryl Purvis helped to organize the St. Joseph clinic, which is the first of its kind in Orange County and is patterned after a program at a hospital near Seattle. Both are involved with the Women’s Services section of St. Joseph.

In the excitement and post-delivery high that mothers feel immediately after birth, they often don’t remember the questions they have. “We find it’s two to three days before they can take it all in,” Purvis said.

Porter said that, when she was observing at the Seattle clinic, she was struck by how the follow-up visits helped to settle jittery nerves for both moms and dads.

“They were so scared,” she said of one couple she saw. “It was so great to see the relief on their faces when they learned the baby was doing great.”