At least 17 nurses in the same unit at one Ohio hospital are all expecting babies this year, breaking a previous record set by the staff at Dayton’s Miami Valley Hospital.
“It’s exciting,” Amberly Saner, a nurse manager at Miami Valley’s labor and delivery unit told ABC News. “We kind of found out over a period of a couple of months how many people were pregnant and it just kept growing and growing.”
The previous record saw the same unit have 11 staffers expecting babies at the same time, according to a Miami Valley news release.
Fifteen of the 17 nurses gathered to take a group photo at the hospital recently, all in their matching uniforms.
Several are expecting their first child while others are expecting their second kids or beyond.
Among them are nurses Maddie and Rileigh, who requested to only go by their first names out of privacy concerns.
Maddie told ABC News she is 26 weeks into her pregnancy and expecting her second child. Rileigh, who is also expecting her second child, is about 31 weeks along.
The two nurses have also both been working at Miami Valley for the past five years.
“Maddie and I are actually best friends. So I’m planning on having Maddie deliver my baby,” Rileigh said.
“There’s also no one else that I would trust more delivering my children than the people who work here,” she added.
Even though a significant number of nurses are expected to go on maternity leave in the coming months, Saner said they don’t expect the changes to impact staffing in the unit, which she noted employs nearly 200 nurses and support nurses.