Does the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative increase breastfeeding?

This month’s featured paper is from Public Health Nutrition and entitled ‘Evaluating the impact of the Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative on breast-feeding rates: a multi-state analysis’Not only does breastfeeding improve the health of mothers and infants, but it also reduces health care costs and has a smaller environmental footprint than formula-feeding. Although currently three-quarters of US women start breastfeeding, women with lower education are much less likely to try. One known barrier is the lack of breastfeeding support that women receive in the hospital. The Baby-Friendly Hospital Initiative (BFHI) was developed by the World Health Organization and UNICEF in 1991 to promote, protect, and support breastfeeding within the birth facility and after. While more than 20,000 hospitals and birth centers in 156 countries have been designated as Baby-Friendly, there are only 182 BFHI facilities in the US in 43 states and DC. Despite the success of the BFHI on breastfeeding practices internationally, research in the US has been limited. We wanted to determine whether the BFHI increased breastfeeding overall and, particularly, whether it improved breastfeeding among women with lower education. Using data from 5 states, we compared breastfeeding outcomes between 11,723 mothers who gave birth in 13 BFHI hospitals and 13,604 mothers from 19 non-BFHI birth facilities. Although overall women who gave birth in BFHI hospitals were no more likely to start or continue breastfeedi...
Source: The Nutrition Society - Category: Nutrition Authors: Source Type: news