Breast milk banks - how to donate

Babies in special care units need breast milk to thrive. Alison Sparkes on supplying your surplus to a breast milk bank

Any new mum who’s just gone back to work will recognise the deep felt need to get back to her infant the minute her working day is over.

With me, the need wasn’t just emotional. Charging up to my front door at 3.45pm, having not seen or fed my baby since 7.15am, I would be inwardly praying that the childminder hadn’t just given him a bottle.

‘Please, please, please let him be hungry’ I would whimper, as my nursing bra creaked under the strain. And the release when he latched on! It was like getting the bomb squad in to diffuse me.

Having plenty of milk to spare can be a bit of a pain – literally – but it can be put to very good use. Jacob at this stage was on a mixture of formula and breast milk, as I couldn’t be sure of expressing enough to see him through each day, so by midday there was a fair bit of ‘Gold Top’ going begging.

That’s when I found out about the local milk bank, quite by chance in the local paper, and joined the herd – sorry – team. Initially though – I did feel a bit like one of the herd. At that time, my local milk bank at Southampton’s Princess Anne Maternity Unit was using electric pumps, which you had to plug in. You put the funnel thingy in place, held your breath, and switched on the mains supply.

And there you sat, humming and slurping loudly, for however long it took to fill a small bottle. My husband wouldn’t let me do it while we watched Neighbours. He was somehow put off the daily dramas of Australian teenagers by the sound of his missus lactating down a plastic tube at 150 decibels.

Happily, by the time I started donating with baby number two, the unit was offering a new style hand pump which was far more effective than either the old electric gear or the hand-held battery jobs – and silent. I could even use it in the rest room at work.

Once a fortnight my yield was collected at the door, in exchange for more sterilised bottles. I pulled the frozen filled ones from among the fish fingers and frozen peas and passed them over. It was the most nutritionally precious thing in my kitchen. And I was thrilled to give it.