Everything offered to your baby needs your consent
Including the things handed over as routine.
In the first hours your baby will be offered a vitamin K injection, antibiotic eye ointment, a hepatitis B vaccine, a blood spot screening test, a hearing test and an oxygen measurement. Some hospitals also discuss circumcision.
Each of these is a decision. Families do decline: in a cohort of 67,750 births, 0.4% declined vitamin K, 2.4% declined eye ointment and 11.1% did not receive the hepatitis B birth dose. In a single-centre study of 3,758 infants, 25% of families declined at least one intervention but only 2 of 921 declined everything.
A documentation problem worth knowing aboutIn that first cohort, only 49.8% of discharge summaries recorded a vitamin K refusal, and 6% of babies whose parents had declined underwent an invasive procedure with no record of their vitamin K status. If you decline something, ask explicitly for it to be documented, for your baby's safety rather than anyone else's.
Where this comes from:
241. Loyal J, Aragona E. Trends in and documentation of refusal of common routine newborn interventions: 2013-2019. Hosp Pediatr. 2021;11(9):962-967.
242. Danziger P, Skoczylas M, Laventhal N. Parental refusal of standard-of-care prophylactic newborn practices: in one center's experience, many refuse one but few refuse all. Hosp Pediatr. 2019;9(6):429-433.
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This page is educational. It supports the conversation with your own clinicians. It is not consent to any treatment, and it cannot assess you. If you are worried about a symptom now, see urgent warning signs.