El Rio health center opens breast milk donation bank

El Rio Community Health Center opened Arizona’s first human milk donation center on Tuesday, joining a national milk bank network.

The collection center is located in El Rio’s Birth and Women’s Health Center, 5979 E. Grant Road, No. 107, and Tucson-area mothers with extra breast milk are invited to donate on site.

“For us to be modeling the commitment to breast-feeding is really exciting,” said the birth and women’s center manager, Olga Ryan. “This seemed like a really good match for us — we have a lot of moms who breast-feed.”

El Rio is joining with Mothers’ Milk Bank, a nonprofit organization based in Colorado that collects, pasteurizes and distributes donated breast milk to babies across the country whose mothers can’t supply enough milk.

“All hospitals use human milk, but mostly for premature babies or babies in the intensive care unit,” Ryan said. “It’s not often that you hear about it being used for full-term infants.”

Ryan said the donated milk is also helpful when issues with breast-feeding arise: Sometimes babies need extra milk to supplement what their mom is producing while the problems are addressed.

“What we really want is to be able to do, is give our moms a ready choice: Do you want formula or breast milk?” Ryan said.

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Jessica Tredici, a registered nurse who works at El Rio, proposed the idea and was already familiar with the program when she visited the Mothers’ Milk facility in Denver to gather more information, Ryan said.

“We’ve had women come to us to sign the required paperwork to donate on their own,” Ryan said.

One El Rio patient, Brooke Rosenau, had been donating on her own for years, packaging her milk in dry ice before shipping it off to Denver at her own expense.

Now Rosenau and other interested mothers can pump at the center or bring the milk in from home. It will be kept in a designated freezer until the collection box is full and ready to send to Denver for processing.

Mothers who are interested in donating must be healthy, producing more milk than their own baby needs, and free from medications that could be harmful to infants, Ryan said.

After a phone interview with a lactation consultant, prospective milk donors will be sent paperwork to take to El Rio and get required bloodwork done.

Anyone interested can call the Birth and Women’s Health Center, visit El Rio’s website or call the Mothers’ Milk Bank directly.