IMAGINE receiving a call about a mum with a three-day-old baby who couldn’t be discharged from hospital because she had absolutely nothing for her newborn.
This is the reality for baby bank volunteer Kim Dewdney, who regularly helps struggling parents at the Little Village baby bank in London.
Earlier this month, she had to urgently gather the essentials together and rush directly over to a hospital.
Kim, 63, who is a freelance tourist guide, from South West London says: “I’m in at least one day a week. And we often get referrals from health professionals, social workers and health visitors for that kind of thing.
“We usually gather bits together for parents in need in a reasonable time scale.
“But then from time to time, not sure how often it happens, but it’s pretty frequently you’ll get an emergency referral.
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“Usually they come from midwives, and it’s usually someone that is in hospital in order to have their baby and they’ve got nothing, absolutely nothing.
“A couple of weeks ago, there was one that stood out to me in particular.
“The midwives were talking to the new mum about going home, but not only did it turn out that she had none of the usual stuff, and actually she had no access in her accommodation to a cooker.
"She couldn’t even boil a kettle which meant that she had no way of heating up the baby formula.
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“It just doesn’t bear thinking about, she would never have been able to give her baby milk because you have got to boil the water in order to make it sterile.
“So they were looking how to get around that, and then we got a referral from them saying she’s got nothing but the number one priority is a bottle warmer.”
Kim and the team rushed to try and get everything they could for the newborn baby, but struggled to find an electric bottle warmer within the donations.
She says: “You can get electric bottle warmers that you plug in and you can heat it up to a suitable temperature.
“So we were hunting for one, we put together a load of clothes which would take the baby up to about six months.
“We put in bibs, and we gave her a brand new bottle pack, towels, toiletries, packet of nappies, baby wipes, baby bath, pram, that sort of thing.
“But I remember getting there and not having a bottle warmer because we hadn’t had one donated.
“Then we got these donations in, and we went through every single bag in the hope that we might be able to find a bottle warmer.
“And right at the bottom of the last bag, there was a brand new one that somebody had donated.
“We were able to add this into the amount of stuff that we had accumulated, put it all together, and the hospital is just round the corner from us. It was a true God sent.
“The hospital was waiting to discharge her and they couldn’t do this until she had some of this stuff like being able to heat up the baby milk.
“We never saw the mum, all of our interactions are with the midwives but you can just see their relief that actually she was going to be ok.
“She was going to be able to not just feed her child, but bathe her child and she had the basics to keep it warm and cool in this weather.”
This isn’t the first and it won’t be the last emergency referral Kim will receive whilst volunteering.
Even this week, she had another call.
She says: “We had another one this week where there was a mum of two boys already, and so in those cases we got things for the baby and for the older boys too like books – just so that everybody is being helped.”
Since the cost of living crisis, Little Village HQ has supported 50 per cent more families in the first half of this year, than for the same period last year.
Kim says: “The number of referrals have rocketed. They went up during COVID because incomes decreased, and people lost their jobs.
“And now they have continued to go up.
“Because of the cost of living problem, people are maybe holding onto stuff for a little bit longer or people are giving it to family and friends because you are not sure whether they are going to afford it rather than giving it to a charity.
“And then even selling it, if you have got an expensive pushchair and you can make a few pounds on it by selling it second hand.
"People might do that, instead of giving it away – so they have the money for an electricity bill or something.
“There’s a problem with donations, as well as the number of people who are in need of assistance.
“There are cases where people ask for them, and we just don’t have them.”
The Little Village HQ say they are always in need of nappies and toiletries, as well as cot beds, buggies and moses baskets.
And in terms of clothing, they often fall short of newborn clothing and clothes in ages three to six.
If people want to help their local baby bank, cash donations are appreciated as this helps to keep baby banks running and able to help more families.
Money enables baby banks to buy some of the items they need, like nappies and cot mattresses, and helps to cover the cost of deliveries to families.
Kim says: “Volunteering at the baby bank is incredibly warming, it’s a completely different mind-set of what you are doing, it’s problem solving which is nice, and you are just reminded all the time of what is going on there in the real world.
“These are people who can’t afford to take their child to the park sometimes, it is terrifying.
If we can just help a little bit, it makes it all worthwhile.
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