Birth center expansion impresses visitors
<p>North Valley Hospital nurse Becky Walling shows visitors the natural lighting in the new birth center rooms.</p>
The nearest birth center to Columbia Falls area residents just received a much-needed expansion. North Valley Hospital in Whitefish is about a 13-minute drive from downtown Columbia Falls.
The hospital’s birth center was built to comfortably deliver 250 babies in a year, but the baby business has been booming with about 500 babies born annually in the facility.
The birth center celebrated the completion of its expansion at an open house last week.
In addition to changes throughout the center, 2,730 square feet were added, which included three combination labor/delivery/recovery/postpartum rooms. These combination rooms allow mothers to stay in the same room from start of labor through discharge making it more comfortable for her and her family. The hospital previously had two labor/delivery rooms and two postpartum rooms. The original space for postpartum was cut in half to create a larger waiting area and lactation room.
The nurses station was expanded to provide room for more midwives and doctors. The size of the nursery was increased for babies needing special attention. But the majority of the time the babies stay with their mother, nurse Becky Walling said. The LDRP rooms have equipment to provide oxygen and IVs for newborns if necessary. The rooms also have birthing tubs because the hospital received a lot patient requests for water births.
Visitors to the open house enjoyed food and music by North Valley Music School harpists, Cindy Weaver and her daughter Bekah.
One of the visitors said she was impressed with the birth center when she had her first child there and wanted to see the changes for her next birth.
“It’s basically like giving birth in a spa,” Kellie Barker of Columbia Falls said. “I didn’t really think there was room to outdo themselves, but they definitely did. … They’re incredibly progressive.”
Another visitor, Michelle Ochen of Whitefish, was in Uganda as a missionary when she found out she was pregnant. She and her husband decided to return to the United States for the pregnancy.
“I’m really glad I did because this [the birth center] is like a five-star hotel in Africa,” Ochen said.
She said she probably would have shared a room with another laboring woman in Uganda. She chose North Valley Hospital because her health care provider uses the hospital exclusively.
The hospital is also on its way to getting a baby-friendly designation. The baby-friendly hospital initiative was launched by the World Health Organization and the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund in 1991. This designation requires the hospital foster breastfeeding success for mothers with newborns.
The new lactation room is next to the waiting room for mothers to have a breastfeeding consultation after birth. Before the expansion the birth center still conducted the visits, but didn’t have a room set aside for it, Walling said.
The next step for the birth center might be to have its own room for cesarean sections, Walling said. Currently the center uses one of the hospital’s four operating rooms.