If something is covered by insurance for free, you might as well get it, right?

In today’s story, that’s the attitude one nurse has when she’s working with her patients (new moms and babies), so she makes it happen.

She changed a policy to be somewhat malicious, but it was also a great way to help the patients.

Let’s see how it all worked out.

Too lazy to do your job? I’ll do it better and make more work for you in the process.

When I was a lactation nurse almost a decade ago, I was only one of 2 who covered the whole hospital on nights.

(only one of us was there on any given day, and we had to cover mother/baby, women’s special care, pediatric special care, newborn icu, and step down).

Our unit director told us the nurse case managers who worked days were too busy to get home pumps for patients.

(even though durable medical equipment was 100% their responsibility and don’t do any patient care).

At the time, they only ordered pumps for patients that had to be separated from their babies or had some problem like low birth weight.

Therefore, it was not that labor intensive with maybe 2-3 patients per shift between 2 case managers needing the pumps.

There were several steps involved in ordering the pumps.

Believe it or not, lactation is way harder at night when new parents are tired, sleep deprived, and trying to nurse a tiny, ravenous night owl.

We had to take over the  pump duty on top of rounding on all the babies on mother/baby (24 rooms), any kiddos having problems on other units, and taking pages to help as needed throughout the hospital.

We had to verify the patient’s address, phone number, etc. and offer them “freedom of choice” of the company they use to order the pump.

Then we would have to go to the doctor on service and ask for a prescription for the pump and get it written before the next day so case management could fax it over and follow up if needed.

They were willing to do just the last steps of the process.

She bent the rules.

As I was passionate about my job, but also saucy, I agreed happily.

But I didn’t just get prescriptions for the higher risk babies.

I got prescriptions for EVERY. SINGLE. BABY. in the hospital who was being fed EVERY. SINGLE. SHIFT.

I also convinced the other night lactation nurse to do the same.

Nobody could argue with her idea.

We sent every family home with a double electric pump (the affordable care act made insurance cover them).

The RN case managers had dozens of scripts to fax and follow up on, and the docs and midwives got irritated with us asking for 15 times more scripts than normal.

However, no one could argue with my logic that all people deserve to have a pump that is covered by insurance, and that teaching on how to express milk and give them tools to do it will increase feeding rates and duration.

This was a baby-friendly hospital (a designation that they had to work for to try to attract patients), so anyone who protested looked ridiculous.

They eventually made it a standard of care that every family was offered a pump.

That’s great that she was able to make a positive change at her hospital.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This woman is thankful for this nurse’s hard work.

This dad is appreciative for nurses like this.

Another person fondly remembers her lactation nurse.

This person would’ve loved to have been offered a pump at the hospital.

She made a huge difference.

We need more nurses like her.

Thought that was satisfying? Check out what this employee did when their manager refused to pay for their time while they were traveling for business.