This week is Breastfeeding Celebration Week; although Covid-19 has changed the way some of our support services can be accessed, our Maternity team has been making sure women get the help they need with feeding their babies. We spoke to Charline Holness, our Baby Friendly Initiative Lead, to find out more.

“We’ve introduced a team who are calling women two to five days after they have given birth to see how their feeding plan is going, answering questions and discussing any problems they might be having. If things aren’t going as they’d hoped, we put them in touch with their community midwife so they can be seen face-to-face the same day. It doesn’t matter if women are breastfeeding, bottle feeding, or doing a mixture of both, we can help.

“Mums can call us or they can email with any queries and we will give them a call back.  The postnatal infant feeding drops in clinics are now accessible over the phone and the numbers are given to the women when they leave hospital. We’re providing women with lots of online resources including videos which can be accessed via the infant feeding QR code in their maternity notes so they can find what they need easily. This information will be helpful for the future, not just while services are running differently.

“In our Neonatal Intensive Care Unit we have a dedicated nurse, Baljit Wilkhu, who is calling mums of premature babies to give them specialist support, with information for things like expressing milk.

“A big part of our role at the moment is to empower parents by giving them some of the knowledge we have as health professionals, especially while we aren’t able to be there physically as often. We’ve found that parents are doing really well in these strange times. Whether they’re breast or bottle feeding or doing a mixture of both – they’re all trying to do the very best for their baby.”