Children’s Hospital of Richmond opens ‘milk depot’ to help bring donated breast milk to babies in need
For a premature baby, sometimes the road to health comes one meal at a time.
Now, thanks to the opening of a new “milk depot” at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond, more of those meals can get to the small mouths that need them.
This week, VCU Health officially opened the King’s Daughter’s Milk Depot, a place where parents can donate extra breast milk to the King’s Daughter’s Milk Bank in Norfolk that supplies critically needed breast milk to premature and medically fragile babies in hospitals up and down the East Coast.
Breast milk, whether produced by the biological mother or donated by someone else, “is powerful,” said Dr. Gauri Gulati, a pediatrician at the Children’s Hospital of Richmond who specializes in breastfeeding medicine.
“It’s more than just nutrition providing protection and immune support,” she said in a statement about the depot. “For some families with breastfeeding challenges, donor milk can make a real difference or provide a bridge while supply builds, giving families reassurance and time.”
People choose to donate breast milk for a variety of reasons, including cases when women produce more than their baby needs.
But previously, families interested in donating excess supply had to travel all the way to the Children’s Hospital of the King’s Daughters in Hampton Roads or ship their milk, barriers that likely discouraged many from doing so.
The new depot — the first of its kind — changes that.
Parents who are prescreened through what Karen Webb, associate chief nursing officer for the Children’s Hospital of Richmond, calls a “very simple process” can now make an appointment to drop off extra milk to a member of the hospital’s lactation services team in the breezeway of the Children’s Pavilion downtown. Donors, she said, won’t even have to get out of the car.
Once the milk is in the hospital’s hands, it will be packaged and shipped to the King’s Daughters Milk Bank. There, it will be pasteurized, tested and distributed to hospitals from Maine to Florida.
The milk bank has “a tremendous reach,” said Webb. Since 2017, the Children’s Hospital of Richmond has received more than 103,000 ounces of breast milk to help babies thrive.
“We will now be helping increase their cache of breast milk to either come back to us or distribute to other families,” she said.
Ashlynn Baker, who oversees milk bank services for CHKD, said the opening of the milk depot in Richmond “reflects the strength of nonprofit collaboration and a shared commitment to equitable access to lifesaving donor milk.”
Contact Reporter Sarah Vogelsong at svogelsong@richmonder.org. VCU is a sponsor of The Richmonder but was not allowed to influence or review this story.
