- The ARC - California Edition -

Newborns Home Too Soon??

With the rising costs related to medical care and the heavy political pressure being placed on the system over the past few years, it was not surprising to see hospitals across this country change their established ways in a manner that would reduce service to their customers.

It always seems hard to get people to accept cutbacks from what had previously been considered the norm. This is especially true when press reports are describing worse case cutbacks.

One of the resultant outcries that was especially vocal focused on the early discharge of mothers and their newborns from the hospitals. Maybe early discharge became the focus because hospital stays for mother and child were being described in the media as being only 8 to 24 hours.

Physicians and the public alike raised concerns about missing or invalid newborn screening tests, or conditions, such as extreme jaundice, not being recognized before the newborn is discharged. The solutions to these technical concerns were quickly handled, most of them politically, with new laws and new regulations being placed on the books. But were these solutions the right ones?

Early this summer after a year and a half of study, researchers from a UCSF Kaiser Permanente group reported finding that the early discharge of newborns from the hospital - even less than 24 hours after birth - is not linked to an increase in the occurrence of extreme jaundice in this young population.

These researchers had analyzed data from almost 35,000 infants prior to making this determination. To me it appears that this study was a little more professionally done than a politician reading a couple of press articles.

- Peter Leibert, Editor