newborn naming conventions

[Mabel Adams]

We are ready to change our baby naming convention to the following and would like feedback:

Single births:

Last name: whatever appears for the last name of the mother on her photo ID (mother being the person whose body the baby gestated in)

 

First name: "Girl" or "Boy" followed by the mother's first name (or all of it that will fit in the computer field). 

 

Example: Mom Stephanie Bates gives birth to one baby girl.  Her name will be BATES,GIRLSTEPHANIE until she is discharged and given her real name.

 

Multiple births:

Last name: whatever appears for the last name of the mother on her photo ID (mother being the person whose body the baby gestated in)

 

First name: Birth order spelled out followed by "Girl" or "Boy" followed by the mother's first name (or all that will fit in the computer field). 

 

Example: Mom Stephanie Bates gives birth to one baby girl and one baby boy.  Their names will be BATES,ONEGIRLSTEPHANI & BATES,TWOBOYSTEPHANIE until they are discharged and given their real names.  (and yes, I see that we blood bankers would see this girl as O neg IRL...   )

 

Can anyone see a problem with this or have a better way?  We want it to work in all computer systems downstream, be visually and auditorily easy to tell from other babies who may share surnames and dates of birth, not alphabetize right by the mother's name and be unique.

 

[Sko681]

I guess it depends on your computer system.  We use Mysis and my only concern would be that the names would never completely fit on the the labels.  It would be Bates, ONEGIR+   We currently would use Bates, Female for singleton and Bates, FemaleA etc for multiple births. 

[MERRYPATH]

We have dropped the sex and use Baby1 and Baby2.

Our protocol does keep the last name of the mother and the first name as you suggest for babies born in system...we have had a problem (or two) with different named babies and mothers matching antibody histories to what we find in a baby. We have our own NICU for our state wide system as well as receiving babies from outside our system so we are not just dealing with our in house naming protocol and it DOES matter when resolving antibody situations, if they give the baby a name before it comes to us...hate it when that happens as I am the oldie but goodie and I am supposed to pull this information from deep memory like my idol Jane Swanson can do...remember the mothers name by her antibody list...Jane is close if not 90 and she could still today pull those out of where she hides them.

We have stopped sex assigning the babies as there is a lot more known about what affect this can have  and more information is needed before some babies sex can be clearly understood.

Edited July 31, 2015 by MERRYPATH

[Auntie-D]

We use MI and FI and the mother's forname. Once the baby has been given a name we change the record and put the mum's name, DOB and hospital number in the patient notes file for the baby so they can always be tied back.

 

My baby would be FI of Dee, AUNTIE, 5/8/15

Edited August 5, 2015 by Auntie-D

[KatarinaN]

We don't use moms first name at all, only last name. So in this case it would be BATES, GIRL or BATES BOY. 

In case of multiple births we go alphabetical. For example BATES, A-GIRL and BATES, B-GIRL etc. Eventhough this is not unique identification but it works for us. Names aren't too long for identifiers.

 

Edit: Just came to my mind: naming is not that unique in our hospital but since babies will have a unique ending to their DOB, there is only o little opportunity to mix the identifiers/tags.

Example: BATES, A-GIRL (070815A012) and BATES, B-GIRL (070815A014).

Edited August 7, 2015 by KatarinaN

[carolyn swickard]

Letters (A, B, C...) and/or numerics (1, 2, 3...) would take less space than the ONE, TWO, THREE you currently propose - just a thought.  If the numbers are buried a little deeper (STEPHANIE1) they won't bother most computer systems.

[Mabel Adams]

We had a problem once because 2 babies of the same gender were born the same day to moms with the same surname.  This meant that neither their name nor DOB nor the combination was a unique identifier.  The blood bank did not know that there were two babies so kept answering the questions about the blood type for the one they knew about.  Finally when the parents of the 2nd baby had their blood drawn to be typed (they knew that they were both O and the baby we knew about was A), we discovered that this was a different mom than the one of the baby we knew about.  Not a great patient satisfier and, in other situations, possibly dangerous.  I can see that it would be really easy to miss giving RhIG to one mom in this situation.

 

There is a recent article in a Peds journal saying that misplaced orders in NICUs are much higher in places with naming conventions like our current one (Bates, Baby Girl) so between these two factors and apparently some problems perceived by nursing here, we are looking to improve things before we have an ID disaster.

 

Thanks for the input.  I think we are leaning toward using the digit in the name if our computers can all handle it.  Nursing wants it at the beginning to make it much more obvious that this is JOHNSON, 1GIRLLILLIAN instead of JOHNSON, 2GIRLLILLIAN.

[goodchild]

What about the patient's hospital medical record number? Unique and unchanging for the encounter hospital encounter.