Human milk bank in Ukraine – relities and perspectives

Premature birth complicates 5 to 8% of pregnancies worldwide. The efforts of the medical world are aimed at improving the care of premature infants, which is much more successful – increasing the proportion of extremely premature surviving infants, improving the health and quality of life of premature infants.
Such measures include, in particular, the early start of enteral feeding. It is its early initiation that is complicated by the delay in establishing lactation in the mother. To overcome this contradiction, it is proposed to use donor breast milk, for the procurement and storage of which human milk banks have been created.
The objective: to analyze the activities of the human milk bank of the Kyiv Perinatal Center in 2020.
Materials and methods. To evaluate the activity of the breast milk bank the main indicators of its work for 2020 were analyzed – the total number of donors, their distribution by age, total milk volume, average milk volume per woman, duration of donor milk to newborns.
Results. During 2020, 65 donors took part in the breast milk donation program, who received 8,603 portions of milk and 8,220 portions were given to recipients for consumption. It is established that the main source of information for breast milk donors is the staff of the Perinatal Center, and therefore – the main motivation to participate in the program is the desire to help in the care of premature infants. The main pool of recipients (67.1%) are patients of the intensive care unit. A small part of the donor milk was consumed by patients of the postnatal care department and the second stage of nursing. Among patients receiving donor breast milk in the intensive care unit, preterm weight categories of 1000–1499 g (49.3%) and 1500–1999 g (32.7%) dominated.
Conclusions. 1. The main source of information about the breast milk donation program is the staff of the Perinatal Center of Kyiv (32.3%), which determines the main motivation of the study participants. The prospect of developing the idea of breast milk donation in Ukraine is popularization in the media in order to expand the audience and encourage women who have given birth in other obstetric facilities.
2. The main pool of DHM recipients in the Perinatal Center of Kyiv are premature patients of the intensive care unit. The largest proportion of patients receiving DGM were in the weight category of 1000–1499 g. The average duration of consumption of DGM by patients in this department is 6.5±0.9 days.