What is the BayCare Donor Milk Program?

BayCare, Tampa Bay’s largest health system, implemented this program to help save the lives of critically ill babies in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU). This initiative will offer vulnerable babies in NICUs nourishing, human milk products made from donated breast milk by mothers in the community with an excess supply. To reach this goal, BayCare partnered with Prolacta Bioscience, a for-profit company, to provide standardized and pasteurized human milk-based nutritional formulations for these fragile babies.

How does this donor milk program help BayCare and the Greater Tampa Bay Community?

Through this program with Prolacta, BayCare recruits mothers within the community who have extra breast milk and who want to help make a difference. Prolacta qualifies the donors to make sure they are healthy, and their breast milk is safe to donate. All of the necessary supplies are provided at no expense to the donor. In return, Prolacta compensates BayCare $1 per ounce of qualified milk to help cover the cost of the program, offered at six BayCare hospitals across Tampa Bay: Mease Countryside Hospital, Morton Plant Hospital, South Florida Baptist, St. Joseph’s Women’s Hospital, St. Joseph’s Children’s Hospital, and St. Joseph’s Hospital-North.

Where does the breast milk go once it is donated?

Once the breast milk arrives at Prolacta’s processing facility, it is pasteurized and made into standardized human milk nutritional products that are safe for use in the most fragile infants in NICUs here in the Tampa Bay community and across the country.

Why is BayCare partnering with Prolacta Bioscience?

BayCare Health System chose Prolacta to help them launch this breast milk donor program due to its unmatched technology, safety and processing capabilities. BayCare and Prolacta, together, are setting the new standard of nutritional care in neonatal intensive care units for fragile, premature infants with this initiative.