Using cloth nappies in hospital

Long-time Clean Cloth Nappies member Jes, reflects on her family’s journey with cloth nappies during a hospital stay, not once but twice in under a year.

We all have our own reasons for wanting to do cloth nappies. For some it’s allergies or sensitivities, others it may be the environmental impact or maybe cost saving. Some simply like the challenge.

Whatever your reasons, if you end up in hospital with your little one, cloth nappies can be a polarizing topic.

We’ve had two stays in hospital with our son, both around a week long. 

Our first hospital stay

The first time was when he was merely five days old. He stopped breathing and after resuscitating him and meeting the ambulance at the end of the road, we were rushed to hospital to find out the wee mite had neonatal meningitis. We’d barely been home a day before this happened. It was exhausting and we’d only been in cloth for the time we had been home (33 hours) before going back to disposables whilst in the ward.

The hospital wasn’t particularly encouraging of cloth nappies during this stay. This was mostly because every nappy had to be weighed to check his kidney function. He was also having full body checks every two hours and was connected to more cords than a puppet.

With everything going on, being only five days postpartum and in the new parent whirlwind, we stuck with disposables before returning to cloth nappies a week after coming home. I understood where the hospital was coming from with their advice to do disposable whilst on the ward, although it did sting a little as I was determined to make cloth work and this was definitely a hiccup.

Our second hospital stay

Our second week-long admission was when our son was six months old, the day before I was due to return to work.

My son had been vomiting six or more times a day, the entire contents of his stomach, after every feed. 

He had a raging torrent that was a beautiful example of Type 7 on the Bristol Stool Chart filling every nappy. 

Gastro had entered the chat and it was making sure we all knew.

This time I was determined to continue cloth. Disposables could not keep the liquid in, they blew out every time he sneezed and I was up to my ears in soiled clothes. 

The hospital, again, weren’t too keen on us using cloth. They were concerned about infection control. They didn’t like the idea of us storing gastro-contaminated nappies during our stay. 

After a few conversations and some troubleshooting, we devised a plan. My husband would collect our nappies every evening and take them home. They were to be stored in wetbags in the bathroom and no staff members were to touch them. 

They would also need to be put inside a plastic bag to be taken out of the hospital.

We managed 3 days in cloth before we ran out of nappies. We were going through 20+ nappies a day and our little one was on rapid rehydration with a nasogastric tube pumping him full of 1 litre of Pedialyte every 2 hours 3 times a day.

Even with all of this he was vomiting and passing straight pink Pedialyte into his nappies. He lost 800g in a week.

We simply could not keep up, despite the hospital being accommodating of us wanting to do cloth during our stay.

The takeaway

We still intend to do cloth if we ever end up back in hospital and each of these experiences has provided great learning opportunities.

Even a failure is still a success if you learn something from it.

We don’t know what the future will bring but I do know that if we get gastro again, we’ll be using cloth again because even with Pedialyte exploding out of my little guy, the seal of a cloth nappy kept it all contained when the disposables simply slowed the speed with which it came out.

We do know that if we have a plan in place on how to manage the nappies, an understanding of infection control and a fallback in case things don’t work out, the hospital are much more likely to accept our desire to use cloth.