An amazing moment never to be forgotten. That is how mother-of-one, Farrah Allan, describes the first time she was handed her baby daughter, Summer, following her birth.
That first contact between mother and child after birth is considered a special bonding moment, but a breastfeeding blunder in some New South Wales hospitals may have robbed some of that experience.
A Freedom Of Information request made by state opposition health spokesman, Walt Secord, has revealed seven babies were given to the wrong mother for breastfeeding in the state's public hospitals between 2011 to 2015.
NSW Health downplays incidents
Health Minister Jillian Skinner has downplayed the numbers, saying they are "extremely rare".
"Almost 100,000 babies are born in all NSW hospitals each year and over the past five years there were seven occasions where the mistakes occurred," she said in a statement to SBS.
Lactation consultant Lynne McKensey Hall said the number of incidents of mistaken identity signals a systemic failure.
She has called for more precautions to be taken by hospitals to prevent such incidents.
"I would imagine there are mothers very concerned and very distressed about it. There are precautions that we all have to take as midwives in a hospital where you're always checking the babies before you take them back to their mothers if they've at any time been separated from them. So there's a breakdown in the system there that I find very disturbing."
NSW Health states that in all cases the error was discovered soon after the incidents occurred and affected mothers are being offered counselling and support.
Midwifery experts say while the situation is concerning, there is no evidence that it might be harmful to the babies.
“People are often worried about disease transmission but the reality is that it's quite difficult for infections to be transmitted via breastfeeding and there are very few that are transmitted via breast milk,” said Dr Karleen Gribble, an Associate Professor from the School of Nursing and Midwifery at Western Sydney University.
"In Australia the disease that people worry about is HIV. We have such extremely low rates of HIV that almost no babies are born to women in Australia with HIV and those that are generally aren't breastfed by their mothers," she said.
Calls for more precautions
Jane Bolster, another lactation expert from Sydney, says mothers and babies should be kept together at all times to avoid such circumstances.
Ms Bolster also dismisses concerns about health risks related to sharing breast milk between mothers, adding that milk-sharing is a well-established practice.
"Many friends create an informal arrangement between each other where they will breastfeed each other's babies,” she said.
”There's also the opportunity to receive breast milk from human milk banks that are around Australia and the milk there is pasteurised. In remote Aboriginal communities and parts of India for example, milk sharing is very common."
Veronica Pearce is expecting her second child this year. She said the thought of someone else breastfeeding her baby without permission is "distressing."
But as a nurse, Ms Pearce says she understands that while policies and procedures are put in place to prevent such occurrences, human error is inevitable.
"If something like that happened to me, if there weren't any... medical issues that arose from the event, a verbal apology and an investigation into how it happened would suffice," she said.
Mother Farrah Allan said new mothers are very vulnerable and she welcomes the offer of counselling and support.
"I think I would be incredibly devastated [if a case of mistaken identity happened to me]. Especially as a first mum, when you give birth you're very raw and emotional, and so I think I would probably be upset if anything."
