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Home › Articles › General Health › Baby's Extended Stay

Baby's Extended Stay

The Reasons Some Full-term Babies Stay at the Hospital

By Lisa Goldstein

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Delivering a full-term baby means Mom and Baby are discharged in a couple of days or so, right? Unfortunately, this doesn't always happen. Even if a baby makes it to full-term, there can be complications. An extended hospital stay for a baby that's not a preemie can certainly be unexpected and difficult to deal with for the new mom.

"I'd heard of things going wrong with even full-term babies," says Leslie Licano, a mom from Santa Ana, Calif. "But I'd been so reassured all the way along that my baby was healthy and developing perfectly that I never thought it would happen to me. I thought we were in the home stretch and that we had made it. It turns out the journey was only just beginning."

Reasons for Staying

There are many reasons that a full-term baby may have to remain in the hospital. Dr. Sue Dulkerian, a neonatologist and director of nurseries at Mercy Medical Center in Baltimore, Md., lists the most common ones:

  • Congenital anomalies (malformations of any organ system that an infant is born with) that may require further testing, treatment and/or surgery.
  • Congenital infection (bacterial or viral).
  • Jaundice.

The full-term baby does have an advantage over the premature one. "The premature infant can have all of the above problems, in addition to issues associated with being born early and the fact that all of their organ systems are not fully mature," Dr. Dulkerian says.

The average length of the hospital stay depends on many factors, such as the problem, the pediatric provider, the facility where the baby is hospitalized, etc. "Generally, if the reason for the stay is suspected infection or jaundice, the additional stay is less than a week's time," says Michelle Collins, instructor in clinical nursing, nurse-midwifery specialty, at Vanderbilt University School of Nursing in Nashville, Tenn.


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