St. Luke’s Antepartum Care Unit
Located on the second floor of St. Luke’s Boise hospital, the Antepartum Care Unit provides a comfortable and cheerful home away from home for expectant mothers with high-risk pregnancies who require days, weeks, or even months of bed rest. Most Antepartum patients are hospitalized for about two weeks, and the new unit allows St. Luke’s to provide the best medical care as well as meet patients’ individual psychosocial needs.
Women are admitted to Antepartum Care for a variety of reasons, from diabetes to premature labor to carrying multiples – and St. Luke’s staff does whatever it takes to help patients and their family members feel at ease. Spending up to eight weeks in bed when you’re not sick (other than the usual discomforts of pregnancy, most Antepartum patients feel pretty good) means providing distractions that truly make a difference.
For example, patients look forward to At Your Request, the room service program provided by Food and Nutrition Services that allows each patient to eat the food she wants, when she’s hungry. Craft classes and massage sessions are held once a week. “Education in a Bag” provides pre- and post-natal learning at the patient’s own pace. Videos and DVDs are available for the large-screen TVs featured in every room, and GuestNet Internet service is available at the bedside. With its family-size refrigerator, huge TV, comfy chairs and couches, and a cozy dining area, the family lounge provides an area for patients and their families to have an occasional “family movie night.”
Even more than the scheduled activities, St. Luke’s Antepartum Care Unit patients appreciate the personal touches provided by the very caring – and creative – staff. When designing the new unit, the needs of patients came first. The new unit has all of the technology you’d expect to find in a state-of-the-art hospital and more: rooms that provide space to comfortably accommodate visiting family members, nature photos adorning the walls, furniture that rocks or reclines, and even an aquarium built into the spa room. The staff is dedicated to doing anything they can do to help lessen a patient’s anxiety, because that’s good for her and her baby.
And the Antepartum Care Unit staff never loses sight of this important fact: Every day that they help a woman hold onto her pregnancy may save her baby three days in the Newborn Intensive Care Unit.
Along with environmental comforts, the staff works to ensure a semblance of normalcy for their patients. They’ve helped decorate patient rooms over the Christmas holidays, held a graduation ceremony on the unit, and arranged the family lounge so a mother could continue to home school her children. Patients can have visits not only from St. Luke’s Pet Therapy dogs, but from their own furry family members, as well.
In addition to these conveniences, a new Maternal Fetal Medicine procedure room is adjacent to the Antepartum Unit, providing convenience for patients, staff, and St. Luke’s Maternal Fetal Medicine physicians, who specialize in treating women with high-risk pregnancies.
It takes very special caregivers to provide for the needs of Antepartum patients. Technical skills are vital, of course, but St. Luke’s looks for something more in our Antepartum nurses – a loving spirit that allows a connection with the patient. Patients on the Antepartum Care Unit often come to view these specialized caregivers as confidantes, friends, and even family. That’s because at
St. Luke’s, high-risk moms receive exactly what they need: excellent bedside skills and tender, loving care.
