How It Works 1: Maintaining Breast/Chestfeeding, Optimising Practice and Support – Part 2

Claire Elliott writes the second part of her article in this series. In order to maintain breastfeeding, healthcare professionals must ensure their knowledge is up-to-date and in line with the requirements of the feeding family to support their long-term feeding goals. All too often, breast/chestfeeding is adequately established, yet maintaining breastfeeding becomes difficult due to inadequate support in the postnatal period, open to misinformation due to limited knowledge and training, the well meant but misinformed advice from the wider family network and lack of access to good quality accessible services. It is well documented that postnatal care is referred to as the ‘poor relation’ of ongoing maternity care and feeding support can rapidly drop off during this time. Here we review physiology, best practice and troubleshoot common problems in maintaining feeding. Read the final part of this article here.