Hospitals and Child Care Centres

re: Use of the Amby Nature's Nest in Hospitals

As you know we have been servicing the hospitals in Sydney and NSW for about 2 years now.

Typically, the impetus for the purchase of the Amby Hammock comes from the registered nursing sister or from the Nursing Unit Manager. In general they worked at another hospital where the hammock has been used and they have seen how good it is for the babies. These nurses can be seen as champions of the product and they vigorously promote it to their colleagues. We are then invited to supply a trial unit and after a couple of weeks they usually order a number of the hammocks. Often the staff are so keen to use the product that they will use money that they have raised through their own fund raising efforts to buy the units rather than wait for the hospital bureaucracy.

In Sydney and New South Wales the Amby Hammock is used in all kinds of hospital situations: Birth Centres, Maternity Units, Neo Natal Intensive care units, Observation and Special Care Wards, tertiary referral units and special clinics eg. the Spastic Centre.

Hospital users report that the hammock is used routinely for all babies in the maternity wards for varying periods of time (i.e.. from just after delivery through to leaving hospital). The only constraint to this that there are, due to funding, insufficient units to go around. In N.I.C. wards, it is used for babies reaching the end of their stay. The loudest praise for the hammocks comes from nurses who use the hammocks in the night nurseries.

All the hospitals (both private and public) are agreeable to displaying a small card indicating where it may be purchased and a number even hold stocks of brochures to give to interested parents. Some hospitals use a unit in prenatal classes to demonstrate how the hammock is used. There does not appear to be any concern with cross infection. Users report that either they do not use it for babies with any suspected infection or, where it has been used for babies with , for example, hepatitis C, the sling is changed and disinfected after each use. Most 'regular' wards (i.e. with healthy babies) simply use a cloth diaper as a liner and launder the sling on a weekly basis.

Of particular interest is the use of the hammock for Infants of Substance Abusing Mothers (ISAM) babies. It is reported that the babies are relaxed very easily and that their mothers can interact positively with them without having to hold them (the mothers often being nervous and reluctant to hold their baby as they are afraid of dropping them).

In general the only contraindication for not using the hammock appears to be that a particular parent might object to the use of the hammock. In most cases it is because the hammock is perceived as foreign or "strange". This kind of objection was never common and is even rarer now that the Amby Hammock is becoming better known among the general public.

2nd April 1993

The Magic Years
Distributors of Superlative Australian Made Products for Infants