Nurses have many duties when providing the best care for patients but the most important responsibility as a nurse is to assess the patient before intervening. Depending on the situation, the nurse will perform either a full head to toe assessment or a focused assessment. However, when looking at mothers and their newborn, a full assessment needs to be performed on both the mother and the infant to check their overall health and see if further testing is needed. Also, the nurse should ask any wishes of the mother on how she wants to care for her newborn.
As nurses, it is important to be an advocate for the patient and if any concerns or questions occur, the nurse is there to answer and support the patient. For instance, while a nurse is performing a health assessment on a newborn infant, the nurse notices that the mother is reluctant to breastfeed her baby. It is important for the nurse to communicate with the mother and ask questions to see why she has these feelings towards breastfeeding. Maybe this is a new mother and she does not know any information about breastfeeding and is possibly scared. When families feel unable and unprepared to breastfeed, success rates will decrease with this, it is important for the nurse to explain the importance and details about breastfeeding and answer any questions the patient has. Breastfeeding allows a mother to provide nutrition, cells, hormones and antibodies to protect the baby from illnesses, provide a lower risk for chronic diseases, and can also benefit the mother (Women health 2014).It is important for the nurse to provide as much education as the patient needs for instance, the technique, the benefits, the challenges that can occur, and provide breastfeeding resources. On the other side, maybe the mother just does not want to go through with breastfeeding because she would prefer not to. Then the nurse needs to provide any consequences and information on what to use to provide the baby nutrients. It is consequently extremely important that health-care professionals, looking closer to nurses, who spend the most time with the patient, provide honest and accurate information to the patient. This is important because there are many new mothers who need this information to succeed and provide a healthy life for their child and the nurse needs to be the one to provide that information.
