Book Description

This book sets out the facts and lines of action that enable health services to achieve their full potential as part of society's first line of support to breast-feeding. Against the larger backdrop of community attitudes that variously sustain or restrain breast-feeding the 32-page booklet translates the most up-to-date knowledge and practical experience about lactation into precise recommendations on care for mothers before during and after pregnancy and delivery. The statement begins by listing 10 important steps to successful breast-feeding intended for application in every facility providing maternity services and care for newborn infants. Readers are told that mothers should be helped to breast-feed within a half hour of birth that newborn infants should be given no food or drink other than breast milk unless medically indicated and that rooming-in should be practised 24 hours a day. Particularly practical is a section devoted to individual care, which spells out procedures to follow at five important stages from prenatal history-taking and counseling through care during and after delivery to what to do when a mother is discharged from the health care facility. Readers are informed that the risk of neonatal infection is in fact greater in the closed environment of a nursery than when infants remain with their mothers and that exclusive on-demand breast-feeding should be the norm throughout the clinic or hospital stay. The booklet concludes with a 20-point check-list that maternity wards and clinics can use to gauge how well they are protecting promoting and supporting breast-feeding.